Science communicators Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper learn about anything and everything interesting! Each episode they teach each other about a science topic, and learn about a miscellaneous topic. Whether it’s bugs on drugs, temporal illusions, or fanfiction, there’s so much out there, so let’s learn everything! Join our Discord, email us, and follow us everywhere at www.LetsLearnEverything.com
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Eyevolution 2 Eyelectric Boogeyeloo & Digital Piracy
How many eyes do these animals have, and more importantly what are they doing with them? And how long has copyright piracy been around, and would YOU download a car? Also Ella finally drops her fake british accent.
Images we Talk About:
Bullfrog Parietal Eye
Bumble Bee Ocelli
Scallop Eyes
Scallop Eye Mirrors
The Home Taping is Killing Music Logo
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:01) Eyevolution II
(00:56:16) Digital Piracy
(01:45:06) Outro
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We also learn about:
How many jingles does this man have up his sleeve?? 2 eyes or not 2 eyes, what do you need glasses for - to see boobs? why have an odd number of eyes when it’s a BOGO deal developmentally, even more amazing than his eye of agamoto - Dr Strange has 2 camera eyes, “I grow fearful of the untrue eye”, bull frogs can’t doom scroll, the pineal eye is a skylight to the pineal gland, ommatidia means little eye, each compound eye only sees one image from the thousand of ommatidia, this is Caroline’s first eyevolution rodeo - we can’t answer all the questions, now you can be annoying correcting people about bug vision, ocelli are also called little eyes, triangular ocelli flight stabilization, Robobee, ocelli are useful because they’re auxiliary, they’re a fast different readout, there are so many more interesting sci fi choices for eyes, maybe they evolved ocelli to not crash when they see a sexy bug, having zero eyes would be going to far, oh wait nevermind, where we’re going we don’t need eyes, “not the implications”, well I’ll answer one of those questions, what do you need eyes for looking at boobs? YEAH I DO ACTUALLY, he complex eyes like a telescope of scallops, THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE A BRAIN, have we gone too far? the living square mirrors in scallop eyes, no one believed scallop TV would work, fair use and fair dealings, early book sellers were book copiers, authors did not make profits on early copies, Martial was the first person to be reposted on 9gag, the library of alexandria operated like OpenAI, book publishers after the printing press were like Universal Music Group - concerned over their rights - not artists, crown approved ABC books, the mid 1600s is the first use of piracy of intellectual property, ruining vinyl records with the cassette tape skull and crossbones, the 2013 Hugh Jackman Oscars performance, Napster’s origins and Metallica’s not so metal killing of it, Piracy was a technical and social phenomenon, YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A FONT, video game antipiracy that reminds you of the creative mind behind the product, none of this is legal advice, the cost of piracy is easy to calculate but the benefit is impossible to measure.
Sources:
The Parietal Eye
Compound Eyes
Holger Krapp's Fantastic Paper on Ocelli
2022 Paper on Ocelli
Otacilia Khezu
The Scallop's Eyes
Scallop TV
Ed Yong on Scallop Eyes
Piracy sources coming soon! Apologies, but thanks for actually going through the sources! You get a gold star ⭐
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85: David Bennett & Why Humans Like Harmony in Music
What is it about harmonies in music that just sounds so good? Can science (and our amazing musical guest David Bennet) help us get to the bottom of it?
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:24) Why do we like Harmony?
(00:56:10) Our Music Theory Questions
(01:24:04) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Listening to Carly Rae Jepsen academically, the musical expert said Caroline has good music taste, I’m down hereeeeee, harmony is just the interaction of any two notes, Tom thinks about high school choir harmony all the time, even babies like harmony, even the oldest flutes have the same holes in them, octaves are so similar we call them the same note, watchmojo ranking of intervals, Carly Rae Jepsen - It Has Many Notes!, a spicy dissonant interval can be good in moderation - like a spicy seasoning in food, Tom is just grinning getting to ask these music questions, we invited you as a guest and you bring this dissonance to our home?? the messy sounding tones match to messy looking ratios, why can we even distinguish pitch? we use pitch in communication so much, animal sounds are the only things that make pitch, animals can recognize intervals, we call bird song song - but to them it’s probably more like language, it sounds cheesy - but in every human voice there’s a harmony, we’re asking the question backwards - we needed to understand harmony to be able to decipher a pitch, hearing the difference between notes IN YOUR HEAD, what we hear in our head is different than the world around us, harmonies are audio cheesecake - something we evolved to enjoy pumped to the max, “we can make cheesecake with our mouths”, cheesecake is just molecules, did you not have to learn human evolution in music school? oh my guilty pleasures are Tchaikovsky’s later works, Ella humble bragging about her spotify wrapped, this is going to come off as hostile but hasn’t enough already been said about the Beatles, how different generations experience the Beatles, more like DavidLegoStopMotion, it took 5 years after a dissertation on how to have a career as a musician on youtube, try song ideas and listen to them later, music theory is Descriptive not Prescriptive, liking technical music, the only way you’ll practice is if you enjoy it, the dopamine hit from the cheesecake of practice, can you send that advice to my mom 10 years ago, but you did practice… yeah, teenagers are good at learning instruments because they have free time, start learning music with the music that you love, learning sheet music at the same time as playing is like learning to write as you’re learning to speak, you learn to write after you’ve practiced speaking for years, you’re full of good ideas David who knew.
84: Tree Talk & Trading Card Art
Can trees talk to each other? And how does that personifying metaphor square with the actual science behind it? And what can we learn from the stories of art on trading cards throughout history?
Images we Talk About:
Trade Cards
3 Modern Trading Cards
Yuka Morii's Cards
Terror
Hyalopterus Lemure
Preposterous Proportions
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:08) Tree Talk
(00:52:16) Trading Card Art
(01:33:47) Outro
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The answer is yes maybe sometimes and no, talking tree folklore, communication as transferring information, The Secret Life of Trees, Caroline WAS vegan, plants feel pain - GOOD, tree self defense, secondary metabollites, you got me AND Ella to write that down, tannin defense mechanism, volatile organic compounds, giraffes avoiding nearby leaves after eating, maybe trees are eavesdropping, mycorrhizal networks, could it be diffusion or a baby tree suckling on its mother, do a stanford prisoner experiment for trees, that tree is giving mother, mother trees - altruistic fungi - and the perils of plant personification, literally talking to trees, your first priority shouldn’t be to not be boring - maybe second, respect for the organisms that are fundamentally unlike us - their unfathomable lives, the modern boom of trading cards, trade cards, mass produced color images were cool and novel, how many credits for that chromo? absurd advertising from the 1800s, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies were all the rage, trade cards were a microcosm of marketing-invention-and collecting, Ella’s baseball impression, looking at a mainstream sport through the nerdiest lens imaginable, cigarette baseball cards, Doug McWilliams photographed 8% of all major league baseball players, oh right photography is an art, and so is building relationships with players, cards began to stand on their own, Richard Garfield wanted baseball cards for nerds, Magic and Pokemon credit their artists - but YuGiOh does not, Yuka Morii’s sculpture cards, Adam Rex’s Terror, Richard Thomas’ Hyalopterous Lemure, Julie Baroh flipping off her classmates, companies screwing over artists, it’s still art in spite of being a piece of cardboard.
Sources:
2010 Paper: Explaining evolution of plant communication by airborne signals
New York Times: The Social Life of Forests
Book: The Secret Life Of Plants
National Geographic: Plants can talk. Yes, really. Here’s how.
2025 Pape: Shrub anti-herbivore defenses exhibit non-linear and varied responses to increased herbivore density
1990 Paper: Acacia Tree Kills Antelope
Book: Ethylene in Plant Biology
BBC News: Plants send SOS signal to insects
TED ED: Can Plants Talk to Each Other?
2015 Paper: Inter-plant communication through mycorrhizal networks mediates complex adaptive behaviour in plant communities
1997 Paper: Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field
2008 Paper: Hydraulic redistribution of water from Pinus ponderosa trees to seedlings: evidence for an ectomycorrhizal pathway
Scientific America: Do Trees Really Support Each Other through a Network of Fungi?
2023 Paper: Positive citation bias and overinterpreted results lead to misinformation on common mycorrhizal networks in forests
2024 Paper: Mother trees, Altruistic Fungi, and the Perils of Plant Personification
Facts or Fairy Tales? Peter Wohlleben and the Hidden Life of Trees
Video: Project gives 200-year-old Dublin tree ‘a voice’
[Scientific America: The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading](The Idea That Trees Talk to Cooperate Is Misleading | Scientific American)
Article: The World’s First Talking Tree Helps Young People Reconnect with Nature
Smithsonian: Do Trees Talk to Each Other?
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Cornell University on History of Trade Cards
History of Chromolithography
American Antiquarian Society on Trade Cards
PBS on Trade Cards
Baseball Card Photography History
Doug McWilliams via Baseball Hall of Fame
Doug McWilliams Interview with SABR
Doug McWilliams NYTimes Interview
Richard Garfield on Magic's Creation
Yuka Morii's Pokemon Card Art
Magic Artist Julie Baroh's Interview
Magic Artist Donato Giancola's Points Against Artist Policies
Magic Artist Melissa Benson's Artist Advice
83: The Most Boring Element & Solving Shakespeare's Accent
What is the most boring element, and just how boring could it possibly be? Turns out: VERY! And how can we decipher what Shakespeare sounded like, and who among us can lay claim to his accent?
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:52) The Most Boring Element
(00:48:53) Solving Shakespeare's Accent
(01:26:37) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We’re not going for the easy sappy answer, what makes something boring? all the oxygen stans updating wikipedia, the most boring is obviously bohrium, thulium is used in lasers and x-rays, about 24 grams of astatine per planet, shout out Sir Martin Poliakoff, the 4 elements that came from pitchblende, Caroline stop anthropomorphizing protactinium, the isotope brevium, you could have been called abracadabra and instead your legal name is Actinium’s dad, wow what a fascinating [Rn]5f 26d7s2 ground state electron configuration! give me more random letters and numbers Tom! protactinium is there if your smoke detector is old, the global ocean conveyor belt, THC (Thermal Haline Circulation), that’s the ocean bit- anyway here’s something completely different about protactinium, paleoclimatology sounds a lot like protactinium, Ella realizes the turn, HE DID IT, whoa Caroline doing thumbs up to climate change, they’re de-extincting William Shakespeare, where better to waste my time pursuing this than Let’s Learn Everything, shakespeare is typically performed in received pronunciation, wait this is secretly a UK vs US topic! I’m surprised it took you 3 years to figure out we just keep you for your American accent, Americans have vestigial roticity, the universal beauty of two dudes yapping, what a strange elitism to claim to have Elizabethan English, Appalachian claims of shakespearean accents as a way to boost image, if you want to know what people sounded like back then… look at what people wrote about it! more one to one spellings like “philome” for film, we can deduce the accent from rhymes and puns, I loov this topic, Tom’s accent gets miscalibrated, an open midback is really stylish these days, open mid back unrounded vowel, Ella can move your tongue with her mind, I see why this gameshow didn’t make it to television, don’t wast a reem on a droom, the Rorscach test of the Original Pronunciation created by David and Ben Crystal, flecks of every dialect, “it’s a sound that reminds people of the accent of their home, and so they ten to listen more with their heart than their head”, “American English simply isn’t good enough for Shakespeare”, the Sundry Boroughs of New York baby! the language of Shakespeare is dead but alive in English everywhere, Shakespeare was meant to be played for the public - so it should be spoken like the public, Shakespeare's accent belongs to all of us!
Sources:
Amazing paper from Nature Chemistry: "The Most Boring Chemical Element"
HPS on Protactinium
Los Alamos Laboratory on Protactinium
Periodic Videos on Protactinium
Mining Website on Protactinium's History
Britannica on Pitchblende
Nature Chemistry: "Peculiar Protactinium"
NOAA on the Global Ocean Conveyor Belt
NOAA on Plankton
EOS on Protactinium for Paleoclimatology
Protactinium/Thorium in Paleoclimatology Textbook
Carbonbrief's Climate Tipping Points
Thorium Protactinium Dating
Yu, Francois, and Bacon's first paper on Protactinium Ocean Current Dating
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Wiki: British colonisation of the Americas
Wiki: Early Modern English
History of English: Early Modern English
BBC: How Americans preserved British English
The Historical Linguist Blog: American English – The language of Shakespeare?
Dialect Blog: Shakespearean vs. Modern English
National Geographic: Tangier Island
BBC: The Tiny Island with a British accent
Language Myths Book
David Crystal’s Original Pronunciation evidence
Paper: Early Modern English Phonology
Oxford Dictionary: Early modern English: grammar, pronunciation, and spelling
University of Toronto: Early Modern English Phonology
NPR: How Did the Bard Really Sound
Youtube: Shakespeare: Original pronunciation
82: International Space Law & Taxidermy
What laws are there to worry about in the moon? And what does space law teach us about Earth law? And what can we learn about societies throughout history from the lens of stuffing dead animals?
Images we Talk About:
Orbiting Space Debris
Fallen Space Debris
Hanging Christian Crocodile
Hanging Christian Crocodile
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:02) International Space Law
(01:03:25) Taxidermy
(01:46:48) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: The splash zone of intro to astronomy, space NCIS, the bedrock of 1967 outer space treaty, the first earthling in space (2 tortoises), countries are responsible for their damage and no WMDs, that big tangible moon in the sky, unprecedented lunar traffic this year, potential water ice on the moon could be the next big space race, there’s no moon water regulation, no nation can own the moon, buuuut can an individual - former ventriloquest and used car salesman own the moon?? god don’t call it “untapped resources on the moon”, you can’t own the moon but can you own its resources, there’s a legal officer for the UN officer of outer space affairs! we can allll frack the moon (except no one signed the treaty anyway), we can’t even agree to share moon resources One Day, only “safe and sustainable” space mining allowed, it doesn’t have to be legally binding to make countries want to follow it, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon would be SICK, sorry about all the space junk us 3 put up there, 90 metric tons of re-entry, suing nasa over space debris, if it launched from florida and hit florida it’s actually local state space law, satellite light pollution, satellites don’t die they just crash into a farm upstate, starlink burnt 120 satellites in 1 month alone, there’s no laws about safely deorbiting - no one has to do this, how we treat space is a microcosm of how we treat earth, space law is real, why can’t we bring our optimism from space back to earth instead of the other way around? Ella’s mouse doing drugs, the art of skin arranging, apologies to our ancient Egyptian listeners, the various techniques of Egyptian preservation, arresting from decay, Frederik Ruysch’s wet specimens, crocodiles make a lot of sense for the first taxidermy cause they’re big and leathery - anyway it was hanging in a church…, Tom loses his mind about A SECOND TAXIDERMIED CROCODILE IN A CHURCH, a croc that’s at least from 1623, The Great Italian Taxidermy Crocodile Road Trip, about one third of the british population went to the 1851 great exhibition, the telescope and taxidermy exhibition sounds like a trap for Caroline and Ella, “whimsy and anthropomorphism in taxidermy of the Victorian era”, anthropomorphic taxidermy was considered grotesque, taxidermy didn’t die we just stuffed it back up, environment taxidermy requires knowing an animal inside and out (pun intended), the degrees of ethical taxidermy, ethical is not a binary, it depends on your personal code of ethics, taxidermy as a lens of moral feelings through history.
Sources:
UNOOSA: Outer Space Treaty
UN: International Space Law Explained
Royal Museums Greenwich: Who Owns the Moon?
Lunar Embassy: Buy Some Moon
Politico: Who Owns the Moon
Guardian: Moon Resources
Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Moon Resources
NASA Moon Mining Contracts
Business Insider: Mining Disrupting Science on the Moon
NASA Artemis Accords
ESA Space Environment Statistics
SpaceWatch: Satellites
Natural History Museum: Space Junk
Guardian: Florida Family Sues NASA
Scientific American: Samantha Lawler, Space X Debirs
Journal of Space Safety Engineering: Uncontrolled Re-entry
UNOSSA: United Nations 2007 Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines
ESA Space Environment Report 2024
Rolling Stone: Space Trash
FCC: Deorbiting Satellites Rule
Scientific American: Space Junk Polluting Stratosphere
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Britannica: Taxidermy
2019 Paper: Animal Bodies between Wonder and Natural History
BBC: Ancient Egyptian mummification 'recipe' revealed
Book: Practical Taxidermy
2020 Paper: The Animal Body As Medium: Taxidermy And European Expansion, 1775–1865
Museum of Idaho: A brief, Gross History of Taxidermy
Atlas Obscura: Crocodile at the Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime Immacolate
University of Dayton: Crocodile Hunting in the Marian Library
Wandering Italy: Grazie, Italy and the Crocodile Church
2006 Paper: The History of Taxidermy: Clues for Preservation
Journal of Antiques and Collectables: Taxidermy: Exploring one of the Most Complicated Collectibles
The Royal Parks: The Great Exhibition of 1851
2012 Thesis: The Shock Proved Fatal: Whimsy and Anthropomorphism in Taxidermy of the Victorian Era, 1851-1899
Cardiff University: Frequently Asked Questions in Taxidermy
Smithsonian: Why Taxidermy Is Being Revived for the 21st Century
Horniman Museum: Ethical Taxidermy
Guardian: Inside the Female-Led World of Ethical Taxidermy
Sussex Wildlife Trust: Putting the Ethical in Taxidermy
Preview: The Lab Rat Games
Welcome to the (preview for the) Lab Rat Games! The GAME show where we compete to learn anything and everything interesting! We love putting games into our topics, so what happens when we make a whole show of them, with each of us hosting their own section! Plus! We're joined by friend of the show and competitive chaos combatant, Sabrina Cruz!
81: Dinosaur Diet Detectives & Proto-Podcasts
How can scientist's unravel the mystery of what dinosaurs ate? Well the clues are right in front of our eyes, or should I say their teeth! And poop! And listener you may already know what a podcast is, but how did proto-podcasts in a chicken coop give us the DNA for what we love, and how did podcasts even happen?
Images we Talk About:
First Iguanadon Tooth
Puffer Fish Teeth
Fish Teeths
Incisivosaurus
Saurolophus
Dinosaur Stomach Contents Fossil
Ham Comic
Sybil's Baby's Radio Rebut
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:33) Dinosaur Diet Detectives
(01:00:51) Support our Show!
(01:04:27) Proto-Podcasts
(02:02:49) Bonus Content!
(02:07:24) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Deep Dive Discovering Dino Diets, dinosaur time, imagining us discovering a new animal, well we know it doesn’t eat nerds, Ella describes teeth perfectly - “is that what you meant to say Tom?”, the mouth is the first stomach, we found the teeth of the first herbivorous dinosaur before the body - and before we had the word for dinosaur, cinderella/goldilocks teeth, dental microwear, food print, the topography of a grasshopper’s mandible, teeth can be more indicative than stomach content, maybe you just tried in and out for the first time when you got captured by aliens, dinosaur teeth are the old coins of ancient civilizations, egg eating oviraptors, it’s not just us but experts that are confused about oviraptaurs teeth, reconstructing the crime scene of a bit mark, this case has been closed for 70 million years! the tarbosaurus seems to have separated the chicken leg to make eating easier, a tyrannosaur leaving a tooth in the scene of the crime, they not only got bit but lived to tell the tale, this proves tyranosaurs hunted living animals - and weren’t just scavengers, hard foods stay in the stomach longer, some dinosaurs used Gastrolith rocks as stomach teeth, rocks natures teeth, Bromalite can be regurgitalite or coprolite, 580 million year old worm poop, we didn’t think grass was that old then we found it in dinosaur poop, we put dinosaur poop in a particle accelerator, we’re not looking at poop - we’re constructing the foodchain of dinosaurs, an ancient egyptian podcast, podcasting is NOT an oral tradition, the chicken coop boys, Sybil’s Little Ham Radio Show 20 years before a woman on proper radio, the Titanic sinking sped along radio restrictions, Tom skipped over the cassette before because its science impact was small but its misc impact was huge, explaining cassette tapes at a high frequency so it doesn’t hurt old people to hear, Lou Otten, the syrian cassette archive, mixtapes, Caroline’s family mix CDs, Tom’s custom Jack’s Mannequin Mix CDs, Pacific Horticulture Magazine being delighted that someone’s interested, Tom’s Magic Corner, I knew it was some journalist doing their thing, apple didn’t come up with podcasting - not even the name, journey back to 1999, the dream of RSS, what’s that facebook shaped cloud on the horizon? the dream of hosting your own feed, somehow podcast RSS survived, podcasts are the Horshoecrab of the internet, “wherever you get podcasts” is amazing, The Lab Rat Games!
Sources:
NHM London: Iguanodon Teeth
NHM London: Beyond Jurassic World- What We Really Know About Dinosaurs and How
NHM London: The Seven Greatest Dinosaur Discoveries of the Last 200 Years
British Ecological Society: What do Grasshoppers Eat?
Phys.Org: Cutting Edge Teeth Study
NPR: Dental Detectives: What Fossil Teeth Reveal About Ancestral Human Diets
University of Tokyo: Dinosaur Teeth Reveal What They Didn’t Eat
BBC: Dinosaur Teeth Reveal Feeding Habits
Incisivosaurus
2022 Paper: Incisivosaura Bite Force
University of Pennsilvania: What Fossils Tell Us About the Dining Habits of Dinosaurs
NHM London: Dinosaur Eating Habit Insights from Stegosaurus stenops
2010 Paper: New information on scavenging and selective feeding behaviour of tyrannosaurids
Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings
2012 Paper: Physical evidence of predatory behavior in Tyrannosaurus rex
Save Our Seas: What Tools do Biologists use to Tell What is on the Menu for Wild Animals?
Scientific America: Tyrannosaur’s Stomach Contents Have Been Found for the First Time
2023 Paper: Exceptionally preserved stomach contents of a young tyrannosaurid reveal an ontogenetic dietary shift in an iconic extinct predator
SN Explores: Fossil Stomach Reveals a Dinosaur’s Last Meal
NHM London: Coprolite
The Bristol Dinosaur Project: The Grass Divide
NPR: Over 500 Fossilized Poops Show How Dinosaurs Came to Rule the Earth
American Museum of Natural History: How Does Studying Dinosaurs Benefit Humanity?
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MET on Memory Boards and Luba Oral Traditions
OED Broadcast Etymology
The Chicken Coop Ham Radio
Sybil's Little Hame Radio Program
NYTimes on Titanic's Impact on Radio Law
Library of Congress on Recorded Radio
NPR On Lout Otten and the Cassette Tape
Wired on Cassette History
NPR on the Syrian Cassette Archive
Berkeley Audio Tape Retrospective
Carl Malamud on Asynchronous Internet Radio
The Earliest Mention of Podcasts in the Guardian
Two-Bit History on the History of RSS
Kevin Werbach's Vision of the Future of RSS and the Internet
TechCrunch: Rest in Peace RSS
Tom, Ella, and Caroline join MFD Spring Break
It’s not MaxFunDrive without a wild kickoff spectacular! Former real-life VJ and host of MTV's Spring Break 1999, Dave Holmes, takes your favorite MaxFun hosts through some wacky ‘90s- and Spring Break-themed mini games!!
Featuring: Dave Holmes, Jeremy Bent, Oscar Montoya, Dimitry Pompée, Tom Lum, Ellen Weatherford, Alex Schmidt, Brenda Snell, Drea Clark, Alonso Duralde, Dan McCoy, Jordan Morris, Manolo Moreno, Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper, Ella McLeod, John-Luke Roberts, Justin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Mike Cabellon, Sierra Katow, Hal Lublin, Danielle Radford, John Moe, Christian Dueñas, Christian Duguay.
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:22) Tom, Ellen, Alex, and Brenda Trivia
(00:32:47) Tom, Ellen, Manolo, and Jeremy on Party Animals
(00:46:34) Caroline, Ella, Ella, and John-Luke on British Spring Break
80: Ify Nwadiwe, The Science of the Peasant Railgun, and a Panoply of Nerdery
Host of Um Actually and nerd of many domains Ify Nwadiwe joins us as Tom helps him deconstruct the infamous Peasant Railgun from D&D. Could it actually work? And can we come up with something even more powerful using real science? We also dig into nerdery old and new, and see if Ify can convince Ella and Caroline to embrace their home country's greatest export: Warhammer.
Images we Talk About:
A Real Railgun Firing
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:05) The Peasant Railgun
(00:43:07) Q&A/Nerding Out
(01:12:19) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: After this black hole research I do appreciate my family more! we’re here to game, what is a peasant? stealing science experiments for DnD campaigns, Caroline and Ella are delighted to learn the Peasant Railgun for the first time, convincing peasants to hands across america, pandering to the audience telling them their smart, My Monster Manual is On the Origin of Species, a peasant message system/computer, let people accelerate things to the speed of light! I shouldn’t let my players do WHAT, and remember kids DONT use a bong because it gets you SO HIGH, I’m reading between the lines Gary would want us to do this, the real rail gun, UM ACTUALLY ITS A PEASANT COIL GUN, rail guns are more common in fiction, the strength of a rail gun tears itself apart and creates a fireball, Ify would make each peasant in the line roll, if your players try to make the railgun say yes then show them the picture, the peasants have the means of production and destruction - they should unionize, the fastest manmade object, the manhole cover isnt the fastest object recorded, mission to touch the sun, gravity slingshot, it’s not the mass of the planet its the orbit, its not a magnet - its a magnet on a bullettrain, DMs watch out for artificer space programs, the duke of musk keeps stealing our government funding, Morgan you’re welcome to play beyblades with Ify any time, marrying bratz and digimon, England’s main export is Warhammer, can Ify convince Ella to play Warhammer, should we do a separate zoom just talking about nerd stuff? online writing forums, audio books are real books, be mean in magic, playing DnD on stage vs at home, playing true to your character.
Sources:
First Edition D&D Player's Handbook
Knight's Digest on Peasant Railgun Origins
Earliest Peasant Railgun Mention
PCGamer on D&D 2024 Dungeon Master Guide Update
IEEE Early Railgun Research
Vice "This Is Why the Navy Can’t Have Nice Railguns"
USC on Railgun Feasability
Popular Science Interview on Railgun Test
JPL Chart of Fastest Objects
CNET on Parker Solar Probe
NASA Gravity Assist Primer
79: The Psychology of Math & Sudoku
Why is math both so easy and so hard for our brains, and how can the psychology of horses, babies, and mathematicians help answer that? And what wild journey did Sudoku take to become the popular puzzle that Ella adores?
Things we Talk About:
The Video of a Child Learning to Count
The Melencolia Painting
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:59) The Psychology of Math
(01:00:35) Sudoku
(01:44:59) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: the Wonderful student, it’s not you - it’s math, “I did biology for a reason”, children can want a lot of complex things, it’s harder in the UK cause its Maths plural, Caroline & Ella’s math journeys, charlie solves the Riemann hypothesis, the horse the myth the legend - clever hans, clever hans was drafted into the military AS A MATHEMATICIAN, real horse math! so many animals seem to have Number Sense, counting is hard for kids, multiplication isn’t counting - it’s memorization and other strategies, Caroline doesn’t have a great Mental Blackboard, kick flipping a chair in our minds to brag to Caroline, overlapping waves, hot or not for equations, hahaha a taylor expansion?? in Lp?? ridiculous! there is no one math organ in the brain, don’t give up on math, “I don’t treat math as a monolith (I think statistics is the worst math)”, that surprises me because sudoko’s amazing and you’re wrong, the ancient mystical turtle’s magic square, a mathematical warding spell, “once something is proved true, it is eternally true”, HOW DID ELLA NOT REALIZE THIS WAS A MATH TOPIC, magic squares are unsolved, math divination, wow this is a math’s topic huh, maths in art, Melancholia, the magic square on La Sagrada Familia, wait Magic Squares AREN’T the precursor to sudoku?? I don’t know this child, if not sudoku why sudoku shaped? the Latin square originated in Korea before Euler, my parents are older than sudoku, it was originally called Number Place, even though we call it Sudoku - in Japan it’s often called Number Place for trademark reasons, the 2004 sudoku boom, sudoku is an infectious meme, this topic took so long (because Ella took sudoku breaks), figuring out the question of unique puzzles, so many ways to think about a square, advanced sudoku techniques, x-wing and swordfish, sudoku championships, of course Ella found speed running in this topic, Sudoku doesn’t seem to cure cognitive decline - but it’s also just fun to do! a beautiful sudoku poem, it’s how we learn and it’s calming - a little win, “I feel like I need to lie down”, let us know if you know the difference between 3 apples and 4 apples.
Sources:
Perfect Pitch Study
Feigenson et al. Core System of Number
The Clever Hans Phenomenon Revisited
NYTimes Berlin's Wonderful Horse
Actual Horse Number Sense Study
Number Sense in Animals
Rat Brain Number Sense Study
NPR Why Big Numbers Break our Brains
Erikson Institute Video of Child Counting
The Development of Mathematical Cognition
Math Expert Brain Activity Study
The Beauty of Math Study
University of MAryland on Math Brain Activity
Keith Devlin Stanford Talk
Katie Steckles: What Do Mathematicians Do All Day?
---
Wikipedia: Magic Square
Royal Institution: Magic Square
University of Cambridge: Magic Square
Magic Squares in Islamic Mathematics
Wiki: Sudoku
The Guardian: History of Sudoku
The Science of Sudoku by BY JEAN-PAUL DELAHAYE
Paper: There Is No 16-Clue Sudoku
Advanced Sudoku Techniques:
Wiki: World Sudoku Championships
Sudoku.com: The Fastest Sudoku Player
Sudoku.com: 4 Reasons that Sudoku is the Perfect Puzzle Game
Working Memory
BBC: Puzzle Slolving and Cognitive Decline
Sudoku 15 year study
Global Council on Brain Health Report
Sudoku Mental Fortitude
78: Drosophila Melanogaster & The British Meal Deal
Why is the common fruit fly the perfect model organism, and the reason for 6 Nobel Prizes?? And what is the british fascination around the meal deal, lunchtime, and the sandwich?
Images we Talk About:
Map of the Fruit Fly Brain
Rat My Meal Deal
The Sandwich Factory
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:57) Drosophila Melanogaster
(00:49:46) The British Meal Deal
(01:37:48) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Ella’s former favorite fun fact, are 6 nobel prizes more impressive than long sperm? we need to pause, bolas, Ella’s Virgins, Dew Loving Black Belly, Dros Mel are human commensals - they migrated with us, “they’re undemanding guests”, first life intentionally put into space, maybe Jeff Goldblum became a fly so seamlessly because they share 60% of their DNA, Tom’s great Jeff Goldblum impression, they share a lot of disease related genes, Thomas Morgan - The Lord of the Flies, Morgan knew about genetics but not DNA yet, genetic redundancy, a fly geneticist’s swiss army knife, the varied list of nobel wins, are they cancelled? wait actually? guess that fly gene, “the inside jokes are becoming outside jokes”, the golden wild west era of the fruit fly may be over - but not all science, the beautiful fruit fly brain, we COULD end by talking about how this little organism has been so belovedly studied and helpful, Dros Mel has a mini bachelorette organ, the great british everything, is this a sincere answer? rating meal deals, fluctuations of lunch elitism, a beaver and a noonshine, capitalism made workers hours longer - workers rights made lunch, lunch was given by and for women, the earl of sandwich was too much of a gamer, we can’t re-litigate the cube rule, the “daring” true story of the sandwich, the sandwich storry isn’t about invention it’s about class, food elitism fads, ella invents soup in a tube, 1980s the first pre-packaged sandwich, units of sandwich (UOS), it’s almost like getting separated from the means of production…, the british sandwich association, take your lunch break! you won’t remember doing an extra bit of work - you’ll remember spending time with folks and making a bomb ass sandwich, short lunch breaks make meal deals make sense, drosophola and meal deals cancelled on this episode,
Sources:
Paper: Drosophila - Model Organism of Choice
Paper: Innate Immune Responses of Drosophila melanogaster Are Altered by Spaceflight
NASA: Fruit Flies in Space
Paper: Drosophila – A Versatile Model in Biology & Medicine
Paper: The Secret Lives of Drosophila Flies
Guardian Article on Drosophila
Paper: Where are Drosphila From
Paper: Gal4 Swiss Army Knife
Nobel Prize: Drosophila
NPR: Fruit Fly Names
Nature News: Troublesome Names Get the Boot
Paper: Fly Brain Map
Fly Brain Image
UKRI: Fruit Fly Neuron Map
Paper Drosophila Sperm Storage
Meal Deal Sources Coming Soon!
77: Light Pollution & Mistaeks
What can we learn from the most modern - but overlooked form of pollution? And can mistakes in art be something actually... good?
Images we Talk About:
Navajo Rug Ch'ihónít’i
Ramses II Statue
Ecce Homo
The Original Ecce Homo
3 Versions of Ecce Homo
Lincoln Memorial Mistake
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:25) Light Pollution
(00:48:06) Mistaeks
(01:37:02) Outro
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We also learn about: Auctioning topics, the origins of pollution, pollution is old but light pollution is from the 1960s, the great stink, the biggest light polluter is the sun, old gas street lights used to be more like beacons than lights, the world’s getting 10% brighter each year, 80% of North American can’t see the milky way, Light Trespass, Sky Glow, light pollution makes telescopes worse, Tom’s parents hearing him scream WHY IS THERE BREAST MILK, the strange lights after the 1994 LA earthquake, amateur astronomers are vital to astronomy, light trapped moths, a 1917 study on lighthouses and bird migration, birds waking up 5 hours earlier, turtles also use moonlight navigation, just move your telescope and evolve your species it’s not our fault, “he glistens you philistine”, the big beautiful glow worm woman in the sky, street lights are like sugar light to plants, light pollution isn’t the biggest issue - but that can make it easy to ignore - and it has some easy wins! it’s solvable at the community level, Tom’s buoyancy broken hand mistake, oops I mixed up my therapy and podcast topic list, the beatles anomalies list, Michelangelo’s beautiful complaint letter poem, we are our own worst critic, the ASMR mistake was just an anomaly, Kintsugi, “it treats breakage as a part of the object’s history rather than an error or a failure to be covered up”, what’s the japanese word for mud covered boots, only god can make perfect fun facts, Ch'ihónít’i, releasing the thoughts from an object - a way out, the journey of Caroline’s darned jumper, how can you tell an old mistake was a mistake? hieroglyphic typos, oh shit control ankh control ankh, revealing an ancient mistake by mistake, Philadelphia isn’t real it can’t hurt you, the Jesus that was… made an anomaly by Gloria Gimenez, the misremembered story of Ecce Homo, art is this emotional roller coaster, wow don’t take Tom’s summary Caroline, Lincoln memorial myths, 1000 years from now a museum in Neo Egypt will carve out the lincoln memorial fix, I know a great art restoration person in spain if you need one, most mistakes are just forgotten, you need mistakes to learn, the mistake of starting this podcast, verbal kintsugi, anomalous jesus, we didn’t learn today that Ella was a contrarian.
Sources:
Britannica: Light Pollution
2020 Paper: A Chronology of Global Air Quality
Wikipedia: The Great Stink
NHM London: Increasing Light Pollution is Drowning out the Stars
2023 Paper: Light Pollution is Skyrocketing
Scientific America: Light Pollution is Dimming Our View of the Sky
2009 Paper: Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution
National Parks Service: Connect with the Galaxy: A case for turning out the lights
CAPE 2023: What are the Effects of Artifical Light on Human Health? An Evidence Brief
2019 Paper: Effects of Light at Night on Laboratory Animals and Research Outcomes
1918 Paper: The Destruction of Birds at the Lighthouses on the Coast of California
2021 Paper: Characteristics of Light Pollution – A case study of Warsaw (Poland) and Fukuoka (Japan)
1973 Paper: Light Pollution
BBC: How light pollution disrupts plants' senses
Dark Sky: Solutions to Light Pollution
---
The Beatles Anomalies List
Michelangelo's "Poem"
Kintsugi
Jill Ahlberg Yohe's Incredible Paper on Ch’ihónít’i
Penn Museum's Ramses II
Ancient Egyptian Literacy
NYTimes on Ecce Homo
The Guardian Ecce Homo Critique
The Art History of Ecce Homo
AP on Ecce Homo a Year Later
Recast: The Funcanny Valley - Spellbound and Gagged
As we plan out the new year, please enjoy a recast of one of my (Tom's) favorite guest appearances on Spellbound and Gagged, hosted by the wonderful friend of the show Ellen Weatherford!
New Year Q&A 2024/25
It's the start of the new year which means a bunch of new questions submitted by YOU! What are our favorite words from the podcast? What's it like to scrap a topic? Would we still love each other if we were worms?
Things we Talk About:
Contrapoints' Twilight Video
Jenny Nicholson's Star Wars Hotel Video
Shaun's Channel
China's Artifical Sun
XOXO 2024 Videos
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:42) Part 1
(01:13:53) Part 2
(01:54:30) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: west our weawy heads, this year we had long topics and a good spread of topics, Jono’s Q&A themes 2.0, next year I’m doing a topic on Caroline, we can neither confirm nor deny it’s the dex we know, Challengers Zone of Interest is the new Barbenheimer, games that show your personality, ahh eating your own poop has been on my list for forever, the use of pseudoscience, Caroline’s favorite word from the podcast is Quantum thanks to Tom (awww), Tom’s favorite is Kleptoparasitism, just “Light” as a topic, can we sweep Ella off her math’s feet, say hi to us! we clicked with Gretchen TOO well, the format change has been great! someone thought that with the format change one person would just not be there, next year one topic - then zero - then negative topics, Ella’s super secret question section, Head and Shoulders made these lovely locks, being non binary, Ella still collects squashed pennies, learning outside the podcast, you are a clown, actually it turns out we don’t need comedy in this show - huh, tiktok is like matches and podcast are logs, tiktok vs youtube vs podcasts, oh people are listening to this, waiting for the other fun to drop, how we resolved learning everything, 2026 is gonna be a banging year, Ella’s 2 Star review of the year.
76: The HaLearnDays Spectacular! 2024
It's the HaLearn Days!! We've gathered a whole bunch of fun facts from each other and from friends of the show to share the gift of laughter and learning!
Images we Talk About:
The Rat Car
Rat Car Video
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:57) Part 1
(00:59:11) Part 2
(01:37:06) Outro
We also learn about: The Christmas Brussel Sprout Tradition, put christ back in halearn days, Where the Dog Ran, eclipses are more of a “huh?” moment, you might hear a frog during an eclipse - or more likely a science communicator, the turkey helicopter truth is stranger than fiction, giraffes can’t walk up anything steeper than 20 degrees, topography is important for giraffe reserves, the emu wars, Anatidaephobia, gotta define intimate, I eat and talk with tongue, our most liked tweet was from a jetlag hat, there’s nothing in the rules that says a wormhole can’t exist and a dog can’t play basketball, we got a rejection on our preprint from St Nicholas, Michel Foucault’s Elf on a Shelf, the scale of believability, when we stopped believing in santa, “Santa knows I can’t speak german”, the child psychology of Santa, William Shatner’s Halloween mask, Sleierton’s Betty Boop ghost mask, Tom finds out he’s driving a rat experiment car, the yuletide tradition of rats, rats would rather drive longer route to get food, alright “Tom Lum”, rice crispies and taco sauce, bingo bingo prison industrial complex! it’s very human to want to have tasty food, the places I would least like to have taste receptors, taste receptors and buds are different, we just discovered them on our tongues first and called them taste receptors, really our tongue has testicle and urethra receptors, screen-based phones, electronic purgatory, we will all get old, and as we say on the podcast: every year another vagina, should all our fun facts be forgot and never brought to mind, we’ll raise a cup of kindness yet, for everything.
Sources:
Minute Physics video on Animals during Eclipses
Frog Song During Eclipse Study
Wikipedia: WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away”
Why Can’t Domesticated Turkeys Fly?
Eureka Alert: Giraffes Struggle with Slopes
The Emu War
Scientific American: 80 million microbes in a Kiss
Microbiome Journal: Kiss study
Nature News: Shared Microbiome
AIP Wormhole Definition & Paper
Astronomy Today on Wormholes
2024 Paper: Children’s Belief in Santa Claus and Moral Behavior
Snopes on Michael Myers Mask
Snopes on Scream Mask
William Shatner interview Entertainment Weekly
Independant: Scientists Taught Rats to Drive
BBC: Rats Taught to Drive Tiny Cars to Lower Their Stress Levels
2020 Paper: Enriched environment exposure accelerates rodent driving skills
Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years
NPR: Ramen Noodle Currency
2013 Paper: Taste perception: From The Tongue To The Testis
NIH In Brief: How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?
1992 NYTimes Article about Cell Phones
CBC Article on the First Text Message
75: Where are We? & Carrot Propaganda
Where are we in the universe? And what can we learn from all the hilariously wrong guesses and bad maps that got us there? And just how much carrot propaganda was there? Well, we'll see a lot of posters and a few myths to debunk!
Images we Talk About:
Dunn's Earth & Moon Maps
Herschel's Milky Way Map
Wright's Island Universes Drawing
The Image of M31 from 1919
First Full Image of Earth
The World Carrot Museum
Carrot Poster 1
Carrot Poster 2
Disney Carrot Characters
Dr Carrot
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:44) Where are We?
(00:45:11) Carrot Propaganda
(01:24:04) Outro
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We also learn about: we’re allowed to make up topics I guess, Samuel Dunn’s map of the Earth and moon, subtle thematic forshadowing, galactocentrism, the awkward teenage years of science, every human could see the milky way, the backbone of night, the milky origins of galaxy, Herschel’s heliocentric drawing of the milky way, Cosmic Pride, the zone of avoidance, island universes is multiverses for the middle ages, the great or not so great debate, can you debate something more interesting like moo deng, M31 the little cloud, the person whose telescope proceeds him: Edwin Hubble, “here is the letter that has destroyed my universe”, years of fighting over terminology, the World Carrot Museum, the moment this turned from a distraction into a topic, we do actually need vitamin A for night vision and eye health, you can only get vitamin A from meat… and vegetables… and fruits, the blackouts in WWII, carrots to help drivers be safer in the dark, incredible podcasts - they help you see in the blackout, Cat Eyes Cunningham, no official document shows intentionally hiding radar with carrot vision, the myth happened organically, “the war could be won on the kitchen front”, Walt Disney designed carrot mascots, if you don’t think food is political I have some posters to show you.
Sources:
Yale History of the Center of the Universe
Library of Congress: History of Discovering the Milky Way
NASA Archive of The Great Debate
Hoskin's Amazing "The Great Debate: What Really Happened"
Astronomy of Today Book with the Image of the M31 "Nebula"
Hubble: The Realm of the Nebulae
ESA Bio on Edwin Hubble
NYTimes Hubble Bio
Science Friday Article about Henrietta Leavitt
Kragh's Fantastic "Nebulae or Galaxies? The history of a change in astronomical terminology
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NHS: Macular Health
American Academy of Opthamology on Vitamin Deficiency
American Optometric Society on Vitamin A Eye Health
Healthline: Are Carrots Good for Your Eyes?
Smithsonian Magazine: A WWII Propaganda Campaign Popularized the Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark
Web Archive: World Carrot Museum
NYT 1940: London Urges Carrot Diet For 'Blackout Blindness'
NYT 1942: Blackout Hints -- From a Blackout Veteran
NYT 1942: Disney Family
BBC: How 'Cat's Eyes' helped change the world
Britannica: One Good Fact
Submit Your Q&A Questions!
It's everyone's favorite holiday: the day we ask you to submit your Q&A questions!!
Go to www.LetsLearnEverything.com/questions and submit your questions about truly anything at all from the science to the serious to the silly!
74: Autumn Leaves & Swearing
Why do leaves change color? No... like really? Like, show-me-the-scientific-literature-really? After all how mysterious could the answer be? And holy frick we're finally doing a topic on swearing!! What are the eras of swearing, and what is swearing actually good for?
Listen to our episode of Escape this Podcast: Oceananigans pt. 3 - The Bering-toss Strait
Images we Talk About:
Carotenemia Hands
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:34) Autumn Leaves
(00:53:04) Swearing
(01:42:57) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Congrats to Kelly & Zach on the book prize! We should write a book, chilli peppers are spicy cause mammals digest them before pooping them out, magnesium makes leaves green, it’s worth it to drop leaves because when they do work they’re so efficient, man trees are interesting, carotenemia, “yeah so if you want an unnecessary amount of detail…”, Caroline has an answer for all our questions, anthocyanins, red leaves could be aposematic, finding one explanation for a color doesn’t mean we know for sure, Tom calls the climate change turn, warmer weather keeps leaves greener in autumn (good) but there’s less sunlight to use it (bad), animals use autumn leaf colors to help with migration, wont someone think of the leaf peepers, I don’t know/we don’t know, this might be too much swearing - thats a threat and a promise, the versatility of fuck, “fuck is good”, may all your teeth fall out except one to give you a toothache, Ella read a book for this of all topics, “hmm… fuck cunt shit…”, determining a historic swear is like jazz - it’s the swear words you don’t see, stop trying to make clit a thing, Ella was totally right to put a swear warning at the top, the nuance of gender roles in ancient rome, Fuck has a beautiful equality to it, shitepokes and windfuckers, cunt used to be just a regular word for vulva, medieval ages didn’t care about shit… literally, the journey of swearing makes dull history exciting, UK US Australia swearing differences, if Ella’s dad saind cunt that’s naughty - if Tom’s dad said it they’d need to have a conversation, our swearing histories, why do we keep swearing? swearing has social benefits, swearing is intimate! swearing for emphasis and believability, we swear without thinking and yet it’s so socially complex, swearing activates different parts of the brain, the “fuck” region of our brain and the fuck region of our brain are closer than we thought, screaming neutral words as a control, swearing is why Ella is the strongest host, we still don’t know Why swearing is so powerful for us, tell us your favorite swears! review corner breaks the fourth wall.
Sources:
Cleaveland Clinic : Can Eating Too Many Carrots Turn Your Skin Orange?
Harvard Forest: The Process of Leaf Color Change
USDA: Science of Fall Colors
Harvard Forest: The Biological Significance of Leaf Color Change
2022 Paper: The phenomenon of red and yellow autumn leaves: Hypotheses, agreements and disagreements
2004 Paper: Plant coloration undermines herbivorous insect camouflage
Science Direct: Plant coloration undermines herbivorous insect camouflage
2004 Paper: Nature's Swiss Army Knife: The Diverse Protective Roles of Anthocyanins in Leaves
2012: Simulated herbivory advances autumn phenology in Acer rubrum
2002 Paper: Foliage color contrasts and adaptive fruit color variation in a bird-dispersed plant community
CID: How Climate Change Impacts Leaf Pigments
Image: Heam VS Chlorophyll
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Yiddish Curse
Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English - Geoffrey Hughes
Holy Shit by Mellisa Mohr
Stapleton et al “The power of swearing: What we know and what we don’t”
Study: Swearing as a Hypoalgesic
Study: Swearing Makes you Stronger
73: Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, Latin in Science, and Internet Linguistics
Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm joins us to casually answer all of our pressing linguistics questions with the most mind blowing facts. Why does science use so much dang latin, and what is so unique about internet linguistics?
Images we Talk About:
Gretchen's Favorite Frogs
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:10:58) Latin in Science
(00:54:49) Misc & Internet Linguistics
(01:22:46) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Words that change the state of the universe, a promise is a kind of magic, “people ask me how i make a living doing linguistics and it’s very simple actually” just make podcast wagers, the language of space, space pidgin language, “that’s a great hypothesis and it’s actually hte opposite of that” sometimes the answer is imperialism! English is being used in science now how Latin was back then, the vulgate bible was latin to reach more people even the “vulgar”, you’re cousins a scribe learning latin - what are you doing a podcast? “Writing is a Technology”, writings only been invented like 4 times, writing originated as reciepts and lists, the A is an upside down ox, why invent a new letter when that means having to change the printing press - just double letter! you access computing through programming and programming is linked to language, we don’t know whether the first language was spoken or signed, french linguists once banned the discussion of the origin of language bcause it was deemed “fruitless”, it’s wild we could retrofit our brains to read and write at all, changing, linguistically accurate sesame street, “Who would know aught of art must learn, act, and then take his ease”, Ella you have goregous tripthongs, nice try Gretchen but our 69th episode was a few back, the Mini frogs, isn’t a linguistic podcast niche? you’re saying that to me in a language, Gretchen loses her words and makes perfect sense, Gretchen went back in time to give herself this mystery book, you don’t have to be the version of yourself you imagined when you were twelve, Linguistics loves undergrad researchers to explain the youths, there’s always new linguistics to study, the kids are changing language- and that’s so fascinating, linguists and polyglots are related but not the same, what makes internet language Uniquely internety, is it really internet lingo or just AAE, the internet made people write a lot more than they used to, informal and unmediated writing is uniquely internet linguistics, people have wanted a sarcasm punctuation since at least 1575, emoji are a form of gesture, postcards were sometimes numbered like twitter threads, Gretchen did Sooo much research into the literature of sarcasm, the potential for misunderstanding is the point of sarcasm, “sarcasm is this linguistic trustfall”, pushing the boundaries of what a language can be, Solresol the musical conlang, language is everything - rainbows are language, whitespace programming language,
72: Former Cryptids & The Art of a Scary Story
Cryptids may be spooky, but what about the spooky animals that turned out to be... real?? And what makes a good spooky story? Could it be something secretly... heartwarming??
Timestamps:
(00:07:15) Intro
(00:04:21) Former Cryptids
(00:54:25) The Art of Spooky Stories
(01:52:33) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Caroline have you never met a vampire? that was from episode number Four Three, what’s spookier than having to be known, Ella met Tom the true Cryptid, the cryptid museum was research, formerly the cryptic mascot: the Okapi, komodo dragons inspired king kong, 60 iron tipped teeth (like beavers), dragon virgin birth, yes queen life finds a way, squid squads on the hunt, only photographed in 2004, 20 years ago - don’t say that, 8 fully controllable giant tentacles, “I’m learning!” as it drags you down to the bottom of the ocean, save the whales because we need them on our team for the kraken wars, you know what’s not a cryptid? western hegemony, the head of a fox and the tail of a monkey, so many names for the jackalope across the world, are jackalopes cancer??? the Jackalope and HPV vaccine are zero degress of separation away, Ella writes a sappy ending for Tom, Ella watched The Ring at 6, being retold Evangelion in an art class, a meteor made of vampires, King’s 3 kind of scary, “don’t you like to feel the shivers?”, evangelical horror, Zhiguai - accounts of the strange, a story of a beautiful harp player, creepypastas, Ella formaly apologize for her cocktober misstep, “I see you sluts out there and I don’t want to do you any disservice, two sentence horror, the artistry of Telling a scary story, maybe the real spooky story was the friends we made along the way who were dead the whole time.
Sources
Guardian: Komodo Dragons
ESA Journals: The Okapi of the Apadana
BBC: Facts About Komodo Dragons
Scientific American: Iron Tipped Teeth
New Yorker: The Squid Hunter
BBC Science Focus: Giant Squid
Wiki: Giant Squid
On the Track of Unknown Animals
The Strange Adventures of Andrew Battell
PBS: Fantastic Creatures
Evolutionary Anthropology: Discovering Gorilla
Cambridge University Press: Hanno and Gorillae
Nature: The First Description of a Kangaroo
National Geographic: The Myth of the Komodo Dragon’s Dirty Mouth
Shope OG paper
Royal Society Paper: Shope Papilloma Virus
The Scientist: On the Trail of the Jackalope
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NYTimes Story on Exxon and Climate Change
A History of Horror
Timothy Beal Paper on Evangelical Horror
Pliny The Elder's Ghost Story
Liu Ming Ming on Zhiguai
The Story of Liang
Gan Bao In Search of the Supernatural
Retelling Urban Legends Study
SCP Antimemetics Division
JSTOR Daily on Alvin Schwartz's Process
CRR Library on Alvin Schwartz Language Arts Interview
71: 🎂 Good Invasive Species, Rock Climbing, and Ig Interviews
For our birthday this year, we've each gifted a topic for one another! For Caroline, an environmental hot take: can invasive species ever be... good? For Tom, an entire topic about one of his favorite hobbies: rock climbing! And for Ella, interviews from the Ig Nobel Laureates this year.
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:09:04) Good Invasive Species
(00:46:31) Rock Climbing
(01:18:05) Ig Nobel Interviews
(02:01:14) Outro
We also learn about: In podcast years we’re 60, Ella’s party hat, what’s your favorite color and least favorite invasive species, it’s my birthday also, the zebra mussel, Humanity: “Hubris et Brevi Perspicacia”, canetoads that can’t even reach the beatles, maybe Ella is biased being part of the largest invasive species: the brits, not all non-native species are invasive, the neutral long island wall lizards, should I stan or cancel the grass? you can’t get rid of the nonnative birds in hawaii without killing the native plants, knowing beneficial non-native species helps us triage the real problems, Caroline’s thesis was on this??? a traditional LLE answer: It’s Complicated, Tom simply screams, duck roll, GTA IV Trailer, songs when he was born, but how does this involve scientology? what makes us human, Live from the Ig Nobels, “Don’t Die”, sometimes you need to remember to breathe, “I mostly just watch clips on Lateral”, Blue Zones, Dr Saul Newman’s Poem, Skinner’s pigeon guided missiles somehow missed Ella, minority report for pigeons, “I’m from New York Most of the Times”, vortex energy capture, The Water Swims the Fish took years, a long winded way to say just keep swimming, the silly in the science, Tom rips up Caroline’s gift.
Sources:
Canal & River Trust: Zebra Mussles
National Museum Australia Cane Toads in Australia
Wikipedia: Beavers in Patagonia
Scientific American: Hawaiian Birds
The Conversation: Some ‘invasive species’ can help native ecosystems thrive.
The Hawaii VINE project
Hofstra University: Italian Wall Lizards
Trends in Ecology and Evolution: Valuing the contributions of non-native species to people and nature
Brown University Press Release
Brown Daily Herald: Rebuttal
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Rock Climbing sources coming soon!
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Ig Nobel Ceremony 2024
Max Planck Institue on Blue Zones
UCL on Saul Newman's Work
Pre-print of Saul Newman's Paper
Smithsonian Mag on the Pigeon Project
NIH on Operant Conditioning
APA Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century Survey
Julie Vargas Queens University Belfast Interview
Jimmy Liao's Dead Trout Paper
70: The Core of the Earth & Planned Obsolescence
What's actually going on in the center of the Earth, and just how interesting and useful could it be? And how did the now ubiquitous Planned Obsolescence start with... bicycles??
Images we Talk About:
An Early Bicycle
Bilhert's Animations
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:06) The Core
(00:58:24) Planned Obsolescence
(01:45:52) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Core Memories, we live on the zest of a lemon, there’s something neapolitan icecreamy about the Earth, Bridgmanite is 38% of the Earth, The Iron Catastrophe sounds metal as hell, an audio journey to the center of the Earth, “Eat My Ass Out Radiolab”, Earth’s Internal Heat Budget is half original energy and half nuclear, the Earth won’t cool down for at least another 10 years, the American Miscellaneous Society’s Project Mohole, in 20 years we dug 12 km and escaped the solar system, when you don’t have earthquakes- use grenades! the shadow in the center of the Earth, Inge Lehmann kicks ass, “the master of a black art”, the inner core wobbles, the core is grainy and grows faster under Indonesia, the 2 most magical things: cold beer and hand warmers, the Inner Core Nucleation Paradox, “how wonderful that we have been met with a paradox, now we have some hope of making progress” - Niels Bohr, the Earth’s magnetic dynamo, Planetary Habitability is uh pretty important, everyone say thank you to the core, the innermost inner core, sometimes the one you’re looking for has been right below you this whole time, Tom falls hook line and sinker for a sudden 175 page bicycle paper, the first bikes without pedals or steering, the boneshaker, older men used tricycles, only the rich and adventurous used bikes, the safety iphone, you’re still using a bike 8? 10% of ads had a bicycle, Bernard London coined phrase the phrase 100 years ago, Planned Obsolescence was a legal proposal, contrived durability, there’s so many flavors and they all suck, e-waste, fast fashion is a vicious cycle, please I’m so full no more obsolescence words, car scrapping, why can we only help the planet when we also make a ton of money too, I’ve never seen someone so excited over Right to Repair, what do you mean you didn’t check every country’’s legal system?
Source
SEG Wiki on the Layers of the Earth
Forbes: Bridgmanite
“Six ‘Must-Have’ Minerals for Life’s Emergence”
Olsen Lecture on the Iron Catastrophe
Bureaeu of Economic Geology on Mohole & Kola
Science Article on Bridgmanite
Britannica on Richard Dixon Oldham
AMNH's Wonderful Article on Inge Lehmann & Earthquakes
Don Anderson Paper Review of the Inner Core
Smithsonian Mag on Inge Lehmann
Excellent Review from Harvard on Lehmann's Groundbreaking Paper
Geological Society of America on Super Rotation
Scientific American on Core Slowing
Space on Core Growth
University of Leeds on the Inner Core Nucleation Paradox
Scientific American on Core Paradox
2023 Paper on the Innermost Inner Core
---
Science Direct: Planned Obsolescence
1984 Paper: An Economic Theory of Planned Obsolescence
1998 Paper: The Most Benevolent Machine: A Historical Assessment of Cycles in Canada
2023: A Deep Dive Into Addressing Obsolescence in Product Design: A Review
IndieAuto: 1960's VW Ad
PERC: Planned Obsolescence: The Good and the Bad
BBC: How The Right to Repair Might Change Technology
The Guardian: Planned Obsolescence: The Outrage of Our Electronic Waste Mountain
CBS News: Apple is Sending Out Payments to iPhone Owners iImpacted by "Batterygate." Here's what they are getting.
The Evening Standard: Apple Battery Lawsuit
Iberdrola: Planned obsolescence
UNITAR: Global e-Waste Monitor 2024
BBC: E-waste: Five Billion Phones to be Thrown Away in 2022
European Parliament: The Impact of Textile Production and Waste on the Environment (Infographics)
The Atlantic: The Neurological Pleasures of Fast Fashion
Britannica: Fast Fashion
Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Fashion and the Circular Economy
WRAP: 2022 Press Release
WRAO: 2022 Report
NatGeo: Fast Fashion Goes to Die in the World's Largest Fog Desert.
UK Parliament: Vehicle scrappage schemes
Cars Lost Forever In The 2009 Scrappage Scheme
BBC: 2030 petrol ban
2019 Paper: Consumer Responses to Planned Obsolescence
Right to Repair EU
European Parliament: Right to Repair
BHS: Sewing Skills
69: Hank Green, Sex Science, Reverse Platypi, and the First Dick Drawing
Longtime inspiration and friend of the show Hank Green joins us for a very special episode! How do colonial organisms with just one queen avoid incest? How many Ig Nobels have gone to sex science? Can the team figure out the identity of the Reverse Platypus? When was the first dick grafitti, and could the story actually be... wholesome???
Watch: The video of the unexpected moment
Images we talk about:
MRI of Sex
Rat Pants Diagram
The Phallodeum Image
Venus of Hohle Fels
The Debatable Dick
Hadrian's Wall Dick Graffiti
Vindolanda's SECVNDINVS Dick
The Vindolanda Dick
Nikasitimos's Dick
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:40) How Not to Colonial Incest
(00:20:52) Ig Nobel Sex Studies
(00:39:07) The Reverse Platypus
(01:06:31) The First Dick Graffiti
(01:33:10) Hank Questions
(01:53:44) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Emmy award winning standup comedian Hank Green, the fellowship of the ning, the literal birds and the bees, the icelandic ant geneology app, icelandians are my favorite colonial organism, breeding flight, slay queen - happy pride everyone it’s when we’re recording this, sperm storage, queens have a life's worth of sperm and eggs inside them, Spermathica that’s my word of the day, the termite queen stores the sperm inside a king, “he’s not my boyfriend he’s my sperm storage unit”, naked mole rats may do incest but they dont have cancer! the answer is “all of the strategies somewhere”, after all reproduction is The Thing in evolution, the ribbed condom won all the prizes that year, any topic can be a sex topic if you try hard enough, I think the ancient greeks proved a gay bomb would make them more powerful, MRI Porn is a new fetish, we should study sex more, sex makes you want to pee, whatever you’re doing pee right now, The Sex Live of Pantsed Rats, would rats be sexier if they wore pants like this or this, our google history is fucked, polyester testicle sling contraception, The Awesome Polyester Scrotum Cup Club, if you’re creative they’re all sex numbers, shark live birth is metal, teamwork - what is this the lateral podcast? Jules Howard presents Duck Vagina VR, “if it’s Caecilians I’m going to be so mad”, Bizarre Beasts gave Tom a heart attack, the Reproduction DLC, Caroline falls in love with Caecilians, “they come in blue!”, all that matters is How Do They Bone! lots of non mammals give live births sharks to snakes to aphids, phallodeum: penis day! “we had to make a whole new peen word!”, phallodeum photo watermark, I haven’t looked at every caecilian penis okay! “can you make it into cheeeese thoooough”, we’ve invented a new fetish and a new delicacy, Caecillians and Sicillians have a lot in common, why are not talking about this more! “it’s not surprisingly, maybe I’m just very smart!”, 40,000 year old genital sculptures, Venus Hohle Fels, the debated dick, ah the conclusive slit! “it’s like looking for a face in a cloud”, the penis test is whether it would be confiscated in school, penis art vs penis graffiti, how many penises on Hadrian’s wall, almost one dick per mile, time to penis, “are you ready for your next penis”, Secundinus deez nuts, when Nick and Tim have sex so good they carve about it on a wall, “little special moments all over the world”, Pompeii sex graffiti, eventually this will be historic! we bully Hank into following Caroline, competing on TikTok is hard and also it’s broken, Hank derails us with a mouth coil, Hank’s science journey, counting clams for the science fair, people like seeing real science, Thanks Hank!
Sources:
List of Ig Nobel Prizes
MRI Genitals Study
Vice: MRI Sex Study
Rats Having Sex in Little Outfits Study
The Rat Study but Humans
Sex Improves Breathing Study
---
NatGeo Caecilian Overview
Textbook Caecilian Overview
Excellent Caecilian Reproduction Review
Extensive Paper on the Phalodeum
Various Non-mammal Milks
The Recent Study on Caecilian Milk
NYTimes Interview on Caecilian Milk
---
2009 Paper: A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany
Smithsonian Magazine: The Cave Art Debate
New Atlas: Scientists Clash Over World's Oldest Penis Carving
2023 Paper- Symbolic innovation at the onset of the Upper Paleolithic in Eurasia shown by the personal ornaments from Tolbor-21 (Mongolia)
IFL Science: Ancient Roman Penis Graffiti Shows Humans Will Never Change
BBC News: Lewd Roman Insult Found on Stone Near Hadrian's Wall
The Guardian: 2,500-Year-Old Erotic Graffiti Found in Unlikely Setting on Aegean Island
68: Phrenology & Lego
It's an infamous pseudoscience, but what haven't we learned from the rise and fall of Phrenology? And Lego are ubiquitous, which means there's a lot to learn and a lot of nuance for our love of these stackable bricks.
Things we Talk About:
The Phrenology Pamphelet
The Lego Cullen House
Lego Seismometer
CERN Lego Device
The Brick Experiment Channel
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:32) Phrenology
(00:56:34) Lego
(01:38:25) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Get the lego phrenology set now! just listing all the lego sets, academic racism, the head wasn’t always so important, the Cardiocentric Hypothesis, Minds Behind the Brain, ancient egyptians just tossed the brain, Aristotle thought the brain was a radiator to keep the heart from overheating, the brain doesn't Look like it does anything, Galen suggested the brain might be important actually, sperm for brains, Caroline enjoys tricking us by saying a person’s good ideas first, Cephelocentric Hypothesis, mapping the brain in the 1600s, NOT related to the frenulum, buzz feed phrenology quizzes, flexing your brain so hard it breaks your skull, Tom is proven to be not funny, our desire for personality tests and fortune telling, travelling phrenology salesmen, there shouldn’t be medical celebrities, phrenology was a passion of the elites, reading an actualy travelling phrenology sheet, “differently bumped”, edibnugrh fringe was a lot less fun when it was the phrenology capital, we checked and it’s actually mozambique have the best brains - just gotta take the L on this one, Marie Jean Pierre Flourens kicked ass and helped kill Phrenology with real science, it comes in like a fad and leaves like a fad, I only liked phrenology before it was cool, the scammers are making our racism look bad! we’re not harsh enough about phrenology, “repoliticizing” phrenology, when it’s built its just one thing but when its pieces it can be anything, shirtless lego jacob, 20,000 lego sets, Play Well - Le go, after enough fires lets just stop using wood, stud and tube design, the lego To Kill a Mockingbird set, mindstorm was ahead of its time, Caroline’s got their lego driver’s license from legoland, lego nerd culture, adults without kids spend more, “transbranding”, Ella had to read so much corporate jargon but it’s impossible to not talk about their business strategies , lego seismograph outside the eras tour, CERN lego, their story is better than ours dad, instructions for a lego skin cell printer, LEGO: expensive for toys - cheap for science equipment! David Aguilla’s prosthetic project, Tracey Williams’ Lego Lost at Sea project, plastic’s resilience is a positive and a negative, lego replay and reuse, this is a trust test of nuance and both things being true at the same time.
Sources:
Minds Behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and Their Discoveries by Stanley Finger
The University of Queensland: Understanding the Brain: A Brief hHistory
Brain Beats Heart: A Cross-Cultural Reflection
Merriam Webster: Phrenology
The Antlantic: The Shape of Your Head and the Shape of Your Mind
Britannica: Phrenology
Smithsonian Insider: Study Finds Facial Structure of Men and Women Has Become More Similar Over Time
2005 Paper: The Reliability of Sex Determination of Skeletons From Forensic Context in the Balkans
The Guardian: Archaeology’s Sexual Revolution
2018 Paper: An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology
Carnegie Mellon University: Phrenology
2021 Paper: Phrenology and the Average Person, 1840–1940
The University of Edinburgh: Phrenology and Edinburgh
Gina Rippon: When Bigger Isn’t Always Better: How History Got The Female Brain Wrong
Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill on Sexual Equality
The Guardian: Django Unchained and the racist science of phrenology
2007 Paper: Marie Jean Pierre Flourens (1794–1867): An Extraordinary Scientist of His Time
---
Lego Twilight Cullen House
Brick Architect: Number of Lego Bricks
Brickset: Number of Lego Sets
Brick Economy Most Valuable
Brick Economy Most Expensive
Wikipedia: Legoland
Lego History Chapter by Lars Konzack
Lego Mindstorms Wikipedia
What is Transmedia? Article
Lego and Transmedia Research
Lego And “Transbranding” Blogpost
Lego Seismometer Kit
Lego Seismometer Youtube Clip
Guardian Article: David Aguilar Lego Prostheses
Hand Solo Youtube Channel
Lego Table From CERN
Article on Other Lego Scientific Tools!
Cardiff University: Lego Bioprinter
Lego 3D Printer Paper
Lego Inventions Video (Pancake Flipper and Super 8 Projector)
Lego T-Rex Sculpture
Lego Every Day Stuff Ideas
Lego Lost at Sea Twitter
Lego Shark Tweet
Tracey Williams Book: Adrift: Lego Lost at Sea
Tokio Express Crash Context Article
Tracey Williams: Lego at Sea Paper
Statista Lego CO2 Emissions
Lego: 99% Outside Emissions
Lego Replay Initiative
BBC: Lego from Recycled Plastic 2018
Wired: Lego from Recycled Plastic 2024
Recast: LLE on SIF - Eeny, meeny, miny, moe
While we're sending Tom "Well Wissage" and a speedy recovery, enjoy Ella & Caroline on this tremendous episode of one of our sibling shows on the network, Secretly Incredibly Fascinating!
67: Epigenetics & The Overlooked World Games
You may have heard Epigenetics used as a buzzword, but what is it really? Is it something we know about, something still new, or... both? And what in the world are the World Games, and what makes them better than the Olympics?
Links we Talk About:
Ella's SciShow Video on X Chromosome Diseases
Sport Casting
Fin Swimming
Haudenosaunee Flag
Christopher Root's Incredible Paper on the Colonization of Lacrosse
The Adorable NYMuseum Haudenosaunee Video
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:21) Epigenetics
(00:57:40) The World Games
(01:50:54) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Ella passes her driving exam Tom’s not bitter about John Oliver, what is y’alls familialarity, epi- meaning on top of, epigentics are like tabs or blacked out text in the book of your DNA, epigentics stop your brain from turning into bone, oh did other people help Rosalind Franklin with the double helix? bases and double helixes and histones, literally blocking DNA from being read, epigentics are less cyberpunk and more exercise is good for you, epigentics is why you go blind from masturbating, it’s simpler in animals, “I’ve been here the whole time!”, “you’re enough Tom”, 2 X chromosomes means you have an extra, X Inactivation, Calico Cats are Genetic Mosaics, your epigentic markers are like your browsing cookies: you clear them before giving them to someone, are pollinators plant cucks? Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance, is it nature or nurture? generational trauma doesn’t have to be epigenetic to be real, inherited cherry blossom mouse sensitivity, the effects are subtle, Ella might have a high epigenetic age from her rock and roll lifestyle, this is so new there’s so much we don’t know, the epigenetic advice: healthy diet and exercise, how different could the world games be? casting for sport, wait did you hear me say break dancing is this a bit, the worst SEO for a name ever, Rugby 7s started at the World Games, the World Games are as old as Beyoncé, let’s do our own thing we’ll definitely be more popular than the olympics, tried at the hague? we sure did! at the least the World Games are being honest about it being a bumpy ride, the “Memorandum of Understanding” reads like a parenting agreement, grouping by sport not nation, the curse of hosting the olympics, reviving forgotten sports like Tug of War, wait who was first?? guys come on have some respect for yourself! breaking records with fins, shark skin suits aren’t biomimicry, tech doping, fin swimming and barebow archery, murderball is an official world game sport, the NYTimes officially called lacrosse “frat boy” sport, mile long hundred person lacrosse, of course sports are spiritually healing, colonizing lacrosse, Haudenosaunee - the people of the long house, Tom cut it with the sad voice tell us what happened, “we wouldn’t be here without their medicine game… they need to be there”, we’ll have to see if the olympics accept the Haudenosaunee, if your games are as old as beyonce you dont have to worry about breaking tradition, “nothing is silly, everything should be respected and held up”, Ella goes OFF and takes over the topic.
Sources:
Chromosome Structure
Aboud et al. What Is Epigenetics?
Nature: Types of Epigenetic Modifications
Study on Exercise and Epigenetics
Nature: Diet and Epigenetics
Macdonald: Epigenetic Imprinting
Nature: When Imprinting goes wrong
Basta & Pandya: The Beautiful X Chromosome
Getting the Right Amount of X
Review on X Inactivation
Calico Cat X Chromosome Inctivation
PBS: Lamarckian Evolution
Cell: Transgeneration Epigenetic Inheritence
How Epigenetics are Wiped Clean
Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance Prisoners of War Study
TEI Dutch Famine Study
TEI Study Children of Holocaust Survivers
TEI Cherry Blossom Mice Study
Epigenetic Clock Review
---
Casting Federation Records
World Games Website: About
1993 World Games at The Hague
The Olympic "Memorandum of Understanding"
Reporting on the First World Games
World Games President Interview about Wheelchair Rugby
NYTimes on Indigenous Lacrosse
Onondaga Nation on Lacrosse
Chocktaw Nation on Lacrosse
Christopher Root's Incredible Paper on the Colonization of Lacrosse
Haudenosaunee History
NPR on Haudenosaunee Players at the Olympics
66: What is a Species & What is UK Voting?
It's a word we say all the time but... what IS a species? How has it been used in the past, and could the different answers all be right? And how does voting work in the UK? It starts with voting for knights, and could hopefully end in the future with something even better.
Images we Talk About:
Ella's Zoom Moustache
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:23) What is a Species?
(01:01:54) UK Voting
(01:50:46) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Jenny Lec, the definition we know is wrong, has anyone taken my title On The Origin of Species? This is my favorite! Oh shit… generic and specific, thinking of species as logical units, Kingdom Phylum Friends Acquaintances Work Friends Genus Species, the anime dewey decimal system, dark fungi, the cognitive dissonance of science at the time, even Darwin didn’t have a good definition of species, 1942 is when the common species definition was popularized, Biological - Evolutionary - Genetic definition of species, species gerrymandering, there is only 1 species of giraffe but should there be 4? policy first science, you don’t need hard definitions to do amazing things, nature is constantly doing kickflips over our no skateboarding signs, you really put your whole polizzy into naming that hybrid, a ring of banging around the himalayans, ring species in actuality look like a biblically accurate angel, let’s just ask what definitions scientists use, you can’t tell if fossils ever fucked, we only knew about human neandrethal interbreeding since 2010, what’s so wrong with having multiple species definitions? there’s a lot to biology! in between “there’s one answer” and “there’s no answers” is “there’s many answers”, Lizzy Poll, you can just call an election early?? in the UK you just vote for your member of parliament, it’s actually really weird to have a separate vote for president, every 2 steps forward is brought 1 step back by “the monster raving loony party”, Elmo think women no need to vote, the house senate and president, coalitions, tea cups with electoral college members on them, electing knights in the first parliament in 1264, bloc voting lets you pick your top favorites, Cromwell was the first Footloose, we had discovered quantum physics before women could vote, First Past the Post was only establish in 1948 in the UK, what are the positives of First Past the Post and cockroaches? please let us loose to bash FPTP, tactical voting, Australia has a version of Ranked Choice, Tom finally gets to wax poetic about Ranked Choice Voting, france’s 2 round voting, if the definition of species should match the task why not the type of voting system? the 2011 voting reform attempt, it’s been the foundation of this country for generation, try ranked choice voting on smaller scales and locally, Ella falls in love with herself, happy hour gender confusion
Sources
Carl Zimmer for NYT "What is a Species Really?"
Aristotle's Use of Species and Genus
Queiroz on Ernst Mayer and Species Definitions
Montana State on Linneus and Species Definitions
Dark Fungi
Ernst Mayer's Modern Excellent "Systematics And The Origin Of Species"
Paper Debating Darwin's Definition of Species
Bird Interbreeding
Scientific American on Wolf Species
The Greenish Warbler Broken Ring Species
Stankowski and Ravinet's Amazing "Quantifying the use of Species Concepts"
NHM "Are Neandrethals the Same Species as Us"
---
Sky News: General Election Explained
UK Parliament: Voting Systems in the UK
Electoral Reform Party: How Long Have We Used First Past the Post?
2019 Paper: Electoral Systems and Electoral Reform in Historical Perspective by David Klemperer
Parliament UK: Magna Carta
PDF: UK Parliament and the Monarchy
UK Parliament: Women get the Vote
BBC: Voting System in the UK
UK Parliament: Proportional Representation
The Guardian: ‘Disproportionate’ UK Election Results Boost Calls to Ditch First Past the Post
The Conversation: The Conservatives May Regret Campaigning to Keep First Past the Post in 2011
The Best of Everything 2023-2024
After much deliberation, the academy (listeners of the podcast) has voted on the best topics from the past year! If this is your first episode, you'll get a sampling of our favorite moments of science and sillyness, and if you're a long time listener, you'll hear some behind the scenes thoughts about the topics, as well as... a secret teaser at the very end??
Images we Talk About:
The Jacobin Pigeon
The Pouter Pigeon
Timestamps:
(00:04:37) Intro
(00:03:59) Part 1
(00:55:00) Part 2
(01:51:28) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: you gotta listen to the best ofs for the rock paper scissors drama, I’m not sure if Ella remembers our names, it’s not the same joke it’s a Call Back, superseding my superseded theories, Tom’s jokes are like the rain - you walk on through and hope it stops quickly, it gets Jalapeno business, I miss Comedy, Ella claimed review corner but keeps forgetting it, the art of topic writing is explaining but also what not to explain, our favorite topics of each others, wrote down the idea for public domain day the year before, Tom goofs up the La La Land Joke, ohh did you just finish episode 50? maybe, thanks everyone for the nice messages, Mum! “those stupid awards”, they’re all great episodes, we learned who in our family listens to our show, you guys wanna learn about ants??
65: Black Holes 101 & Tattoos
What happens when a star collapses to a point of near infinite gravity? And just how hard could that be to actually... find? And why do we love tattoos so much, and how long have human beings across the world been loving them too?
Check out Tom's first long form video that's finally out!
Images we Talk About:
The Crab Nebula
First Image of a Black Hole
Photo of OUR Black Hole, Sagiratius A
Ancient Siberian Tattoo
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:47) Black Holes 101
(00:57:51) Tattoos
(01:43:53) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: black holes are massive (mass) but not massive (size), nothing can escape a black hole, supermassive black hole by muse, the closest black hole is 1000 light years away so we don’t need to worry about them too much, matter can’t escape the Plunging Region, does your McDonald also have black holes? stellar evolution, “they’re just big gassy balls doing nuclear fusion”, the fusion in a star pushes against the gravity keeping it in equilibrium, Caroline’s fear of the sun expanding, stellar corpse, a neutron star is just made of neutrons - that can’t be right, if you add too much flour (mass) this will turn into an atomic bomb (black hole), stop saying massive and start saying voluptuous to avoid confusion, one in every thousand stars could be a blac khole, “surely that’s not sustainable” “have I got news for you about the future of all things”, theorizing a black hole in 1783, we only get the word Black Hole in 1964, betting on Signus X1, finding black holes by nearby objects’ bright hot death screams, it took 2 years to process the black hole image, sorry I think it looks like a butthole, Sagitarius A - our galaxies butthole, deslicious spaghettification, we’re all being spaghettified, I’m being raviolified here! where do you go in a black hole? into a topic for another day, “tom saw the topic on me”, no inheritance until you tattoo me onto your butt, Caroline got a tattoo to honor pigeons, the above skin - the skin - and the below skin, phagocytosis, microphages contain and become the tattoo! “the art is your immune system” and we only knew this in 2018, Ötzi the Iceman had 57 tattoos, ella regrets letting us guess what tattoos he had, ritualistic and therapeutic tattoos, egyptian women tattoos, old preserved siberian tattoo, the painted picts, Tattoo comes from the Tahitian word Tatau, famed tattoo afficianado Charles Darwin, the meaning of polynesian tattoos, sailor tattoos were inspired by polynesians but adapted to things meaningful to them, sailor tattoos were like sailing achievements, shark repeller tattoos, ancient greek tattoos were literally “skin-stigmas”, stigma affects culture and culture affects stigma in a feedback loop, “true on all accounts for my case”, gender norms in tattoos, “ooh another means by which to put down women don’t mind if I do”, biases in the workplace,”it’s literally only skindeep”, tattoos are so personal and human of course you can’t assume or speak to all of them, they’re an art and they’re universal across cultures.
Sources:
NASA: Black Holes
Science News Explores: What are black holes?
Gravitational Collapse Overview
Goddard Space Flight Centre: The Life Cycles of Stars: How Supernovae Are Formed
Britannica: End States of Stars
Britannica: Evolution of High Mass Stars
Britannica: Origin of Chemical Elements
BBC Bitesize: The Lifecycle of Stars (GCSE Resource)
NASA: Neutron Stars Are Weird
Science News Explores: A Short History of Black Holes
Astronomy: A Brief History of Black Holes
Lind Hall Library: John Michell
American Museum of Natural History: The Country Parson Who Conceived of Black Holes
University of Chicago: Black Holes Explained
Astronomy: Cygnus X-1- The Black Hole that Started it All
Event Horizon Telescope: Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of Our Galaxy
1978 Article: A Supermassive Object in Galaxy M87
Space.Com: Where do Black Holes Lead To?
SYFY: How Worried Should We Be About Black Holes?
Podcast: The Guardians Science Weekly- White Holes
Image Source: NASA First Image of a Black Hole
Image Source: Event Horizon Telescope: FIrst Image of Black Hole at the Centre of the Milyway
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Pew Research: How Many People Have Tattoos?
The Science of Tattoos
Mouse Tail Tattoo Study
Wellcome Collection: A Brief History of Tattoos
Smithsonian: More History
Japan’s Tattooing History
Maori Tattoos
Polynesian tattoos
Pazyryk Tattoos (Very Cool)
First Female MP to Wear Moko
Sailor Tattoos
Broussard & Harton's Amazing Tattoo Stigma Study
64: Tom Scott, Human Acceleration, and Failed Videos
How fast can a regular human accelerate from 0-60? How can you learn to love roller-coasters? And is there a terrifying experience Ella's done that even Tom Scott hasn't?? After having us on his show for so long, it's finally time for Tom Scott to join us on our show!
Videos we Talk About:
Tom Scott's Amazing Roller Coaster Video
Tom Scott's Failed Video Video
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:15) Human Acceleration
(00:50:03) Roller-coasters and Failed Videos
(01:18:05) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: herding cats and children, Thanks for the compliment you can leave now, UK metric is a mess, milk is just a blur cause it’s PastYourEyes, both Tom’s can’t be like this, stopping the angular velocity pedants, what’s so hard about orbital mechanics it’s not rocket science, this is a question full of "um actually"s, the longest second of Tom Scott’s life in the Mythen car, “would you do it again” “oh in a heartbeat”, just frame cars as IRL speedrunning, “oh my god she got sub 1 second”, please prove me wrong so I can ride it, steam catapulting a plane, the Nevis Catapult might win if you believe the hype, all politely saying roller coasters, “roller coaster nerds are like train nerds but worse”, running coasters at 100%, calibrating the weights of cars, British politeness way under-markets stealth, “I’ve done something Tom Scott hasn’t done??”, the experimental Nürburgring coaster that only operated for 4 days, Do-Dodonpa the “rattly bastard” that broke bones, dragsters going 0-60 in half a second stunned us to silence, you could buy the nitro X2 for less than a tesla but you do get to drive a tesla more than twice, “I reserve the right to turn this into a video essay”, our roller coaster journeys, dread and expectation, Ella loves the fear, “this is the worst thing I’ve ever done, YES”, LLE live episode on a roller coaster, Dick & Dom in da Bungalow sounds like a parody of something british, only americans will remember Raccoon Barrel from the Barrell Brothers! “It has been a metaphor which is possibly the highest priase I can give something like that”, making a video about failed videos “you only get to pull that trick once”, Tom’s one shot Netherlands drone video, “it was a Look How Clever I Am video”, ideally it’s both clever content and cleverly shot, “the content has to be worth it”, it’s like OKGO - matching content with production, the ratchet of quality, “the frustration I feel is a compliment to David”, “i left everything on the table”, 3 of us just mimed sword swallowing, "not a great mime"
Pride Merch & Voting for the Best of Everything!
It's Pride and Poll-jedice! For pride month we have some pride merch including an amazing design by Caroline, with proceeds going to Pride in Stem! Also, toss in your vote to defend the honor of your favorite topic for the next Best Of Everything episode!
All of this is at LetsLearnEverything.com
63: Biomimicry & The Evolution of Chess
What can we learn by mimicking animals in nature, and more importantly, what can we learn about the nuance behind the buzzword of biomimicry? And just how many wild facts are hidden in a simple chess set?
Images we Talk About:
One of the Oldest Shatranj Sets
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:26) Biomimicry
(00:50:25) Chess Chess Evolution
(01:33:41) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: So nice to have a topic taken, biomemetics, the spider grabber is more like bio-stealing, “nature is a giant pool of ideas”, “nature is the OG and does it best, organism level, lily leaf umbrella, who remembers davinci? none of his flying machines even worked, a quick lesson on flying, biomimcry was only coines in the 1950s and only become trendy in the 90s, gecko feet, spinning the biomimicry slot machine, sheep wool antidepressants, a biomimicry quiz, oh right we want fewer train sonic booms, whale flipper tubercles, whale power turbines, Ella biomimics Caroline, termite AC, destroying nature to recreate nature, biomimicry 3.8, the ickyness of corporate biomimicry, we’re an organic sustainable biomemetic podcast, a person after our hearts critizing a ted talk, you can biomimic like davinci or the wright brothers, nature is not infallible, pitching our own biomimetic ideas, bumble bees saying oops, ripple, chess chess evolution you know like that game, can’t stop thinking about those anal beads, everything Caroline’s learned about chess is against their will, Tom learns about himself by talking about chess camp, scachs d’amor was so nerdy, the hornets nest of chess historians, chess comes from the indo-persian area, borders are weird why do I need so many modifiers to describe this area, calling it a horsey is more historically accurate, a chariot makes so much more sense than a castle moving across the board, oh wait does no one else call this piece a religious figure? the knight has been unchanged for 1300 years, the chad knight vs the virgin bishop, we codified white goes first after discovering quantum physics, do you want to play a game of king? Your king is in king, shah mat - the king is dead, people say check because “I won’t let you do the silly thing, we’re gonna keep playing for a little bit”, checkered comes from chess not the other way around, cheque -> exchequer -> checkered -> chess -> shah, why aren’t we talking about this more! Ella’s very good biomimicry review corner
Sources:
Biomimicry as a Sustainable Design Methodology
How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation
Types of Biomimicry
History of Biomimicry
Velcro
Biomimicry in Flight and Wing Design
NASA Wing Morphing
NASA Successfully Tests Shape-Changing Wing
Japanese Bullet Train
Whale Turbines
WhalePower
Soft Tobotics
Tentacle Robot
The Planned City of Lavasa
Eastgate Centre
Biomimicry 3.8
The Limitations of Biomimentic Architecture
The Ripple Device
Mosquito Inspired Needles
---
Davidson's Incredible "A Short History of Chess"
Scachs Damor
The Beginnings of Chess
Oldest Shatranj Set
The MET "Chessmen and Chess"
Wired: The Game of Chess had Patch Notes Too
White and Black in Chess
The MET "Shah Mat!"
gov.uk on The Exchequer
Encyclopedia Britannica Chess History
62: False Memories & House Plants
How much real science is there to the Mandela Effect, and how much should we be worried about our faulty memories? And what's the science and history behind our long love for house plants?
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:31) False Memories
(00:57:30) House Plants
(01:37:47) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Yes Ella my favorite host of Let’s Learn Everything, Fiona Broome - Paranormal Researcher, Ella is shocked to learn the Mandela Effect was a conspiracy first, repressed memories, the McMcartin Preschool Trial again, the concept of memories at all is bonkers, we shoudl do more experiments, flashbulb memories aren’t as “unchanging as the slumbering rhinegold”, the original study didn’t even check if the memories were accurate they just assumed, flash bulb memories only Feel more accurate, the concept of false memories can make people believe in the mandela effect MORE, don’t have an existential crisis, rebunking your memories, most memory recalls aren’t adversarial like mandeal effect questions, Metamemory effects, just like memory isn’t so simple false memories aren’t so simple either, “I wish I hadn’t said yay when you said racism”, does anyone remember the 2 president Obamas? we gave false memories to bees, having false memories makes bees MORE complex not less, false memories aren’t flaws they’re just part of memory, classic meatbrain, “my brain is a beautiful and complex thing”, movies can exist, The Four Legged Chairs, the art of putting a plant into a pot, egyptians used plants for a ton of stuff, portable plants, gillyflowers for bad breath and paying rent, peppercorn payment, (ayyy), Wes Anderson’s The Winter Hotel for Plants, renting plants for a party, the illegal orchid trade, plant hunters, pteridomania, the World War 2 potted plant boom, the millenial urge to care for plants is more of a historic urge, guilting your cohosts into talking about your plants, you’d need 10 potted plant per square foot in the home to clean the air, just imagine yourself as a Sim you need art and plants, hot or not for plants, there aren’t really huge health benefits from plants, it feels like studies are asking “why do we like plants so much??”, just enjoy plants for the sake of enjoying them, office plants are nice but I feel like work life balance will do better for my health, I just think they’re neat!
Sources:
Snopes: The Mandela Effect
The Wiley Handbook on The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory
Ethan Watters: The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement
The False Memory Syndrome: Experimental studies and comparison to confabulations
The Fallibility of Memory in Judicial Processes
UCLA Med on Memory
Implanting False Memories
Hirst and Phelps Amazing Review of Flashbulb Memories
Predicting Confidence in Flashbulb Memories (re: Michael Jackson)
Fiona Broome: The Mandela Effect is Not False Memories
False memory and COVID-19: How people fall for fake news about COVID-19 in digital contexts
BBC on Mandela Effect
False Memory in Bees Study
Analysis of False Bee Memory Study
Don Hertzfeldt On Memory
---
National Museums Liverpool: Gardens in Ancient Egypt
Britannica: Houseplants
National Trust: A Potted History of Houseplants
Horticultural Reviews, Volume 31, The Foliage Plant Industry
Grace and Thorn: The History of Houseplants
Cobham Museum: Windlesham- Peppercorn Payment
The Plant Runner: A History of Houseplants
The Scotsman: Our Fascination With Indoor Potted Plants has a Long and Colourful History
Architectural Digest: The Most Iconic Houseplant Trends Through the Decades
The Guardian: Indoor Plant Sales Boom, Reflecting Urbanisation and Design Trends
The Telegraph: Houseplant Sales Soar
2019 Paper: Potted Plants Do Not Improve Indoor Air Quality: A Review and Analysis of Reported VOC Removal Efficiencies
University of Reading: Owning Houseplants Can Boost Your Mental Health – Here’s How to Pick the Right One
2022 Paper: The Appearance of Indoor Plants and their Effect on People's Perceptions of Indoor Air Puality and Subjective Well-Being
RHS: Houseplants: To Support Human Health
2022 Paper: Effects of Indoor Plants on Human Functions: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analyses
BBC: Are Your Houseplants Bad for the Environment?
61: Whale Fall Ecology & Jury Duty
What happens when the largest living animal becomes the largest dead animal? Just how complex could a dead whale be? And what are the differences, flaws, and nuances of the jury system, and can we be studying it better?
Images we Talk About:
The Zombie Worm
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:59) Whale Fall Ecology
(00:52:52) Jury Duty
(01:32:41) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: A bucket of mice, when whales die the people who love them will miss them, a jury of your cohosts will decide if your topic is boring, Tom stretching his arms to measure a 34 meter long whale, marine snow and whale falls, gettin ghastly gassy, a new mussel told us to go check out the whale fall, whales are mortal, deep sea mussel delicacy, how hard could it be to find a whale over 70% of the earth’s surface? let’s just wait for the carcass to come to us… wait actually?? welcome to our automatic zoo of dead things on the beach brought to you by the crown, sinking beached whale carcasses, the 3 stages of whale fall, Denial/Mobile Scavenger Phase can take 2 years, scavengers eat about one (1) Caroline of whale per day, Enrichment Opportunist Phase, Sulfophilic Phase, 7% of a whale is bone lipid, a sulfur bacteria carpet. did we walk into Caroline’s trap? This final phase can last 100 years! It’s not a trap if I’m asking you a question! 690,000 whale falls at any time, never in my wildest dreams would i be so lucky as to know the 12km distance from fall to fall statistic, whaling is deforestation for bacteria, Osedax or the zombie worm or the bone devourer or snot flower, there’s Drama in this whale fall ecosystem, dinosaur fall ecosystems, fossilized bones with fossilized deep sea snails, we got picked to talk about jury duty, UK US differences, a 900 day trial, there’s something wrong with Ella, the US is the only country to have so many civil juries, this topic has become a US UK debate, only the US requires unanimity, juror selection bias, racially diverse juries do a better job, I wish we could be surprised peremptory challenge is biased against women, oops it’s a british colinization topic, you could literally say too many asians, semi-jural systems, is this a philosophy topic about human nature?? our various biases, the confirmation bias against tom’s bad jokes, can we study jury bias? there hasn’t been any research on live jury deliberation.
Sources:
NatGeo: Dead whales are washing up on the East Coast.
NHM: Whale Fall: What Happens When Whales Die?
Review of the Impact of Whale Fall on Biodiversity in Deep-Sea Ecosystems (2022)
The Discovery of a Natural Whale Fall in the Antarctic Deep Sea (2013)
NPR: What Happens After A Whale Dies?
Scientific American: Life at the Bottom: The Prolific Afterlife of Whales
Fish Food in the Deep Sea: Revisiting the Role of Large Food-Falls (2014)
NatGeo: Making a Home on Plesiosaurs
Chemosynthesis-Based Sssociations on Cretaceous Plesiosaurid Carcasses (2008)
---
Cornell Law: What is Jury Duty?
Jury Law UK
Magna Carta
538: Jury Duty is Rare
Jury Service in the UK
Juror Exemptions and Exclusions USA
Differences between US and UK Legal Systems
Jury Duty in UK vs USA
UK Civil Case Info
"Justifying Prohibited
Peremptory Challenges (2007)"
Jury Under Fire: Jury Selection Can Effectively Identify Biased Jurors
NACDL: Bias in Jury Selection
EJI: History of Bias in Jury Selection
Comparison of Juries in Democratic Countries (2007)
Jury Trial in different countries
World Jury Sytems: Exporting the English Jury System (2000)
Monash Law: Do we need juries?
Cognitive and Human Factors in Legal Layperson Decision Making: Sources of bias in Juror Decision Making (2022)
Thomas Lecture on Jury Bias
The Curious Case of the Jury-Shaped Hole (2023)
60: Near Earth Objects & Guitar Tabs
What are all these rocks hurtling through space? Do we need to worry about them, and what can we learn from them? And what are guitar tabs, why don't people take them seriously, and why does Tom love them so dang much?
Videos we Talk About:
Osiris Boop Gif
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:54) Near Earth Objects
(00:56:58) Guitar Tabs
(01:47:55) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
e|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| B|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| G|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------| D|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|
A|---------------2-|-----------4-6-4-|-----------6-7-0-|-----------6-7---| E|-0---------2-4---|-----------------|-----------------|---------------0-|
(tabs via lucamashup)
e|----------------
B|----------------
G|----------------
D|-8888-10-10-333-
A|-8888-10-10-333-
E|-6666-8--8--111-
We also learn about:
I thought you were just going to just teach us guitar, still on course to learn everything in a few months! everyone’s favorite part: semantics and exceptions, Tom is a perfectly unmovable object, it’s doxxing myself if people know I’m the center of the universe, the great attractor was my nickname in high school, “naturally occurring objects traveling through our solar system which are smaller than planets and aren’t moons”, you must be 1 meter tall to be an asteroid, asteroids are metally comets are icy, a song of rock and metal dust and ice, asteroid/comet -> meteoroid -> meteor -> meteorite, 1.3 million known asteroids and only 3,800 comets in our solar system, within 50 million km it becomes a near earth object, obviously we’re all thinking about the Tunguska asteroid asteroid, 80 million trees felled and it didn’t even hit the Earth, one of the oldest meteors we know is from 2 billion years ago, the vredefort dome, 2 billion year old nuclear weapon testing??? the only time the earth makes Shatter Cones is meteors and nuclear explosions, if the meteor had hit the water it might not have been so catastrophic for dinosaurs, but it was going 20 kilometers per SECOND, a force 10,000 times the world nuclear arsenal, the crater has to be DISCOVERED, what does it mean for 50% of species to go extinct, the asteroid also vaporized the ground and water, impact winter, stopping photosynthesis kicks out the base of the foodchain, the meteor that broke the camel’s back, land animals over 25kg went extinct, there were a few lucky ducks, LLE Meteor Insurance, as long as Aerosmith is alive we’re fine, Asteroid Watch via the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, people listening 100 years from now hope you don’t have any asteroids (sucks to suck), Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Double Asteroid Redirct Mission, I cheered when we smashed into that asteroid, activating asteroids, asteroids are loose remaining legos from the formation of the solar system, OSIRIS-REx sample return, a kid named Bennu, tom loses his mind at the video of Osiris booping Bennu, personifying Rex, OSIRIS APEX, Apophis will be closer than some satellites, POV Apophis shots, Astroid Quakes, “cute is a weird way to describe a spacecraft touching an asteroid”, casual Caroline classical guitar lore drop, Tom learns guitar by accident, “too bad I picked this up so late”, Ella’s youtube ukulele era, don’t stop believing, tabs aren’t shittier sheet music, Van Halen didn’t invent tabs, tabs feel modern but also obvious, just because words are more efficient doesn’t mean diagrams aren’t useful, I’m just trying to play Don’t Stop Believing I have to worry about context? Guqin tablature dates to the 7th century! music has a lot of racism, rockin out those lute tabs, I knew this was secretly a font topic! monospace fonts revitalized tabs, sheet music software is garbage, god did not want me to use LaTeX they wanted me to use my mortal hands, OLGA, reading Beyonce tabs is not the same as listening to Beyonce, Paul McCartney’s the one who plays Blackbird wrong, let the philosophy professor enjoy his guitar! why punish the people who love your work, tabs are in a gray zone still, ultimate-guitar has a monopoly, the gray zone may benefit publishers, thanks swifties, Thomas Chesney’s tab research, it’s not a million miles away but it’s not right, ooh this song’s so commercially viable! Polphia’s tabs, Pinegrove’s tabs released before the songs, Tom’s guitar tabs, being a part of someone’s music journey in a little way, this could have been a guitar tab podcast, a cozy review corner.
Sources:
The Structure of the Milky Way
The Great Attractor
Nasa on Orbital Debris
Asteroids vs Comets vs Meteors
Nasa on Asteroids
Notable Asteroid Impacts
Tunguska Event
Atomic Asteroid Blasts
Vredefort Impact Structure
NASA on the Dinosaur Extincting Asteroid
NHM: Why did the dinosaurs die out?
Near Earth Objects
DART
Asteroid Watch
Asteroid Watch Dashboard
DART results
Nasa Data on Bennu
OSIRIS REx Touch Down
Bennu Sample Analysis
Nasa Data on Apophis
ESA's Possible RAMSES Mission
---
NPR on Online Tabs
Van Halen Tab Interview
Mick Goodrick's The Advancing Guitarist
Yang Yuanzheng on Ancient Guqin Tablature
Solitary Orchid on the Guqin
Tantacrul's Critique of Sheet Music Software
Laura Gary's Amazing Legal Analysis of Tabs
Paul McCartney on Blackbird
NYTimes on Guitar Tab Legal Troubles
Ultimate-Guitars Licensing
Chesney's Paper Studying Guitar Tab Authors
Polyphia Tabs
Pinegrove Tabs NPR Interview
Tom's Habanero Tabs
Newspeak Dictionary
Preview: Rats! Cheddar Heist!
With Tom as their DM, Ella, Caroline, and Ellen Weatherford team up for a dicey heist in the big apple. Only one catch: they're rats! Can Rex, Tango, and Muriel ratatouille their way to nab the cheddar, or will they crumble like feta? Believe it or not this is only the first quarter of the full 2 hour episode that you can only get by becoming a member at MaximumFun.org/join
59: Quantum Physics & Gossip
Can Tom finally take on his science communication white whale: Quantum Physics?? And what is gossip, what did it mean in the past, and could it actually be... good?? Find out on a very special MaxFunDrive episode!
See all the MaxFunDrive events, pins, and links here!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:06:29) Quantum Physics
(01:00:14) MaxFunDrive!
(01:09:08) Gossip
(01:44:14) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
One minute of self indulgence, another bit?? when bugs gossip, Moby Dick was warning about the perils of teaching quantum physics, the word quantum is boring, every grocery list is quantum (except Ella’ infinite and continuous grocery list), Ocean’s 11 is a quantum movie, quantum physics is 100 years old, why doesn’t my toaster blast me with radiation, Lord Rayleigh is literally the why is the sky blue guy, Planck really didn’t want to be right, “an act of desperation”, you’re taught quantum physics in high school chemistry, Heisenberg v Pauli v Schrodinger beef, fully just saying jackass, even smart people hate quantum physics, “nobody feels perfectly comfortable with it”, YOU ALREADY KNOW QUANTUM PHYSICS, Newton has been redeemed! we almost called photons “quantums”, some of quantum physics is bullshit but not all of it is, what has quantum physics ever done for us? we do actually have a quantum phone and quantum machines at the hospital, Quantum Nuclear MRI machines, sometimes it’s nice to remember that, Schrodinger's Cat is the worst first thing to learn, “not a real experiment, does not prove anything, does not match physical reality, and was intentionally designed to be absurd”, it’s like learning about vision through only optical illusions, “but where’s the weird?”, making peace with your whale, as long as you support us we will live forever, no Ella, there’s nothing wrong with you, “debrief”, gossip can be positive! GODSIB MEANT GOD SIBLING, you wouldn’t bang your godbrother, Tom you don’t have kids, in the 12th century you could leave your kids to watch Dune 2 whenever you wanted, a gossip is someone you can tell anything to, gossips were backup for lecherous men, gossip was a neutral term for an essential supportive community, gossiping about witches gossiping “that’s gossip as well babe”, spoiler for most social issues it’s about class and power, scold’s bridle, “I love idle talk, I’m a witch”, coffee houses are just gossip houses, “oooh yeah, evolution and gossip, this is good stuff”, we wouldn’t be humans if we weren’t sociable and idle talking, gossiping is like primate grooming, animals would LOVE to gossip if they had language, I don’t care what you think as long as it’s about me, work stopping gossip seems neutral but isn’t, I’m not gossiping I’m receiving evaluative information about a colleague, it’s good the science doesn’t show bullying is cool actually, most gossip is neutral gossip, I wouldn’t compliment my boss - only in gossip, you think it’s not gossip cause it’s about Tom Brady?? It is!! it’s all preamble for review corner.
Sources:
Melville's Book on Quantum Physics
Dan Styer's Amazing Brief History of Quantum Physics
Dan Styer's Textbook "The Strange World of Quantum Mechanics"
Futurama Quantum Joke
Chad Orzel on the Origin of Quantum Physics
Helge Kragh's History of Planck as "The Reluctant Revolutionary"
Heisenberg's Letter to Pauli (s/o to u/restricteddata)
Gilbert Lewis' Naming of the Photon
Chad Orzel "What Has Quantum Mechanics Ever Done For Us?"
Old Computers
Nobel Prize Committee on Bloch's Work
Dr. Baird's Great Analysis of Schrodinger's Cat
---
Gossip and Resistance Among the Medieval Peasantry
From the Whisper Network to #MeToo—Framing Gender, Gossip and Sexual Harassment
Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens, Chapter 3.2
The Psychological Anatomy of Gossip
Tell Me the Gossip: The Self-Evaluative Function of Receiving Gossip About Others
BBC Worklife: The Surprising Benefits of Gossip
Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective
How the “Gossip” Became a Woman
Gossip and Gender Differences: a Content Analysis Approach
BBC Worklife: Why Gossiping at Work is Good For You
Go Fact Yourself MaxFunDrive Kick-off Spectacular featuring Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, Teresa McElroy, Ross Blocher, and Jordan Morris
IT'S THE MAXFUNDRIVE!!! And we're kicking it off with a network-wide trivia competition with other MaxFun hosts!
You can see all our upcoming events during the drive and become a member at www.LetsLearnEverything.com
This special network wide event is a celebration of the MaxFunDrive! If you’d like to support podcasts you love for just $5 a month and get bonus gifts in the process, go to maximumfun.org/join.
J. Keith van Straaten and Helen Hong from “Go Fact Yourself” are joined by:
Teresa McElroy - “Shmanners”
Ross Blocher - “Oh No, Ross and Carrie!”
Ella Hubber & Tom Lum - “Let’s Learn Everything!”
Jordan Morris - “Jordan, Jesse, Go!” and "Free With Ads"
If you’d like to hear more hosts competing for trivia supremacy, visit Maximumfun.org for the full version of this show.
58: Kelly & Zach Weinersmith, Mars Ecology, and Space Communes
What would a man-made ecosystem look like on mars? Just how complicated could it possibly be? And are the human and societal issues just as complicated? Science communicators and authors Zach and Dr. Kelly Weinersmith ask and answer all of these questions and more!
Check out:
A City on Mars!
The Weinersmith's article on Frontier Mythology and Space
The Weinersmith's paper in the journal Space Policy on Space Communes
BeaWolf
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:30) Mars Ecology
(00:47:28) Space Communes
(01:11:59) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: The superior Weinersmith, we almost have a Doctorate majority but not quite, having a PHD doesn’t make you smarter it just makes you poor and willing to suffer, back in my day Comic-Con was only 2 pence, we only just learned about high perchlorates on mars soil, all those images of glass habitats on mars would be SO DEAD, “this doesn’t sound appealing to me… to live under the dirt”, just rinse off all your dirt how hard could it be, the engineer brain thinking “if a problem is solvable then the problem is solved”, apologies to the rotating space colony community, space waste is a pain in the ass, cows aren’t efficient but BUGS are, Biosphere 1 is Earth, Lunar palace, there aren’t many experiments and we don’t really know how this all scales, if Sarah goes we’re fine and if I go I destroy the colony by BREATHING TOO MUCH, everything’s more complicated in space, Lungs help your facility PVNRT, humanity needs a plan B but “a backup that loses that much ground on human rights is not a backup i want!”, historiography of space: history of how we think about the history of space, being a wet blanket about frontier mythology - you are speaking to the right people, “there are beautiful dreams, but I feel like the beautiful dreams tend to crack when you look at them with a little more detail”, “cows are just a nonstarter in space”, goat cheese pizza was great for morale, finally we can stop poisoning ourselves with taro, vegans are great on mars, the only life threatening scorpion you can find the US makes it onto Noah’s ark, solar is great but not when there’s dust storms, we have dormant nuclear reactors in space, Simpson reactors, in conclusion: we’re not ready, it’s not as easy as making a terrarium, closed loop ecologies are not normal, who knows what happens 10 years in, “this is the problem with talking to Zach and I”, the superior Weinsersmith has subsumed the other in a violent coup, this isn’t a hypothetical: “there’s answers to these questions”, mars religion, you can’t take your barbies and go home on mars, literally no one wanted to do dish duty, SELL THEIR HOUSES TO WHO BEN FUCKING AQUAMAN, “being able to leave is HUGE for so many reasons”, “so Zach and I are both cowards”, speculating is good to imagine problems to avoid them which is maybe the least funny answer I’ve given, “you can’t jump back to roman law”, “I think the book is much better because of our conflicts”, going on research walks, we don’t have time for space law, “that’s not a common response Tom”
Sources:
A City on Mars!
The Weinersmith's article on Frontier Mythology and Space
The Weinersmith's paper in the journal Space Policy on Space Communes
57: Don't Lose Your Head! and Constructed Languages
Losing your head isn't good, but what actually happens, and what can it tell us about animals, ethics, and bad science? And what is a constructed language, when does it fail, and when can it be use to make great... art? As they say, Ni Lernu Ĉion!
Content Warning that today's science topic can be a bit grim, so if you want, you can skip ahead to 54:54
Things we Talk About:
Mike The Chicken
Sea Slug Moving
The Narmer Palette
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:36) Don't Lose Your Head!
(00:54:55) Constructed Languages
(01:36:55) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Pretty clear cut or chopped, did we need to write this down? why do you die when you lose your head? let’s start with a deep philosophical question: are we our brains? Tom clearly doesn’t know Mike the chicken, Mike was the original pitch for Charlotte’s Web, mooching some slugs, The Mystery of the Beheading of Elysia Marginata, capital punishment comes from beheadings, the guillotine could behead 20 people per hour, “the most gentle of lethal methods”, …do you guys not have the death penalty? ethics of rat euthanasia, Canavero’s bogus self published head transplants, like the language you’re speaking RIGHT NOW, Auxiliary Engineered and Artistic Languages, Tom falls into Ella’s Esperanto trap, Esperanto was banned and persecuted, the benefit of Esperanto is it has no culture, English is a language of exceptions, 1850 to 1920 people were going WILD constructing languages, none of us had heard of Volapük, “a language without umlauts sounds monotonous, harsh, and boring”, the language wars, a priest and an eye doctor trying to solve the tower of babel, Esperanto has “dipthongs - ugly!”, “rattling an hard bony R”, Artlang POP QUIZ, for Tolkeins the languages came first, english is a tapestry of languages and artlangs can convey that, the use of purposefully meaningless artlangs, soo soo! NOOT NOOT! boyhowdy! nonsense languages have universality, citing the pingu fan wiki, is penguinese more universal than esperanto??? Toki Pona, newspeak, “and that brings us strangely and sharply to the end of the topic”, appreciating real turtles and robot turtles.
Sources:
BBC: The Chicken That Lived For 18 Months Without a Head
Britannica: How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head
Scientific America: Fact or Fiction?: A Cockroach Can Live without Its Head
New York Times: Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies
NewsWeek: Did Anne Boleyn Really Speak After She Was Beheaded? Here's the Science
American Historical Association: Narmer Palette
2023 Paper: "The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods": The Question of Retained Consciousness Following Decapitation
1975 Paper: EEG Evaluation of Humaneness of Asphyxia and Decapitation Euthanasia of the Laboratory Rat
2013 Paper: Electroencephalographic Evaluation of Decapitation of the Anaesthetized Rat
2011 Paper: Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’
1991 Paper: Pain Perception in Decapitated Rat Brain
New Scientist: Head transplant carried out on monkey, claims maverick surgeon
2019 Paper: First Human Head Transplantation: Surgically Challenging, Ethically Controversial and Historically Tempting
The Guardian: First Full Body Transplant is Two Years Away, Surgeon Claims
The Telegraph: First Head Transplant Successfully Carried Out on Monkey, Claims Surgeon
Vice: Head Transplant Surgeon Claims Human Brain Transplants Are 'Technically Feasible'
2017 Paper: Surgical, eEthical, and Psychosocial Considerations in Human Head Transplantation
---
Constructed languages:
Francois Rabelais
International Auxiliary Languages
Esperanto
Esperanto 2: electric boogaloo
Native Esperanto Speakers
Why Learn Esperanto:
English language exceptions
Creating new words in Esperanto
Volapük
Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük
Quenya
Quenya Course
Klingon Language Institute
TGIF in Simlish
How Simlish was Created
Penguinese
Penguinese example
Animalese
Animalese example
Polygon on Animalese
Toki Pona:
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Experimental languages
Newspeak
Newspeak Dictionary
56: Are We Still Evolving? & Famous First Messages
How have human beings evolved, and how could we evolve in the future? And what are some famous first messages, and what can we learn from looking at them?
Images we Talk About:
Telegram
First Record Image
Second Record Image
Other Record Images
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:15) Are We Still Evolving?
(00:52:00) Famous First Messages
(01:38:17) Outro
We also learn about:
DANGER BOO BOO, Ella has her own discord?? homo sapiens were 300,000 years ago but humans were 2.5 million, homo sapiens coexisted with 8 other human species, homo habilis was chilling for a million years, the homo hunger games, neanderthals had sewing needles and clothing, they seem so human because they are, maybe it was our chins, it’s hard enough not to anthropomorphize other animals let alone other humans, humans were the same height 40,000 years ago, humans may have lost height from being shit at farming, we have smaller brains but that doesn’t mean we’re less smart, natural selection & mutation & gene flow & gene drift, the iphone gave us smaller jaws, melanin is about synthesizing that sweet sweet vitamin D, we have evolved the adaptation of diversity, physical appearance is mostly just vitamin D and warmth - that’s it, it’s not good genes vs bad genes, microevolution, “instead of a mass of clones, we are already starting to see a glorious riot of variations”, this is all speculation, “we’re very unpredictable”, hello world! I learned it by watching you!! shouting and switching places, Tom live writes fanfic, purpose & imagination & inspiration, no YOU hang up, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT, hey is your daughter okay? tone poems, Ella bled for her art in *checks notes* We Will Rock You, the dynamic range of the alpine symphony, if found please return littered golden record to Earth, ooh criteria! images on the record are COPYRIGHTED, who knows if they’ll be in the public domain by the time aliens get it, the beauty of the calibration circle, pulsar map, Ella’s not inspired, Caroline inspires Ella a bit, mixing up the golden plaque and golden record, MIR LENIN SSSR, DISREGARD PREVIOUS MESSAGE USA FOREVER
Sources:
Homo Habilis
Natural History Museum on The Origin of Our Species
Other Human Species
The Guardian on Neanderthals
Why were homo sapians the winners?
How have we changed?
When did we become fully human?
Factors Driving Evolution
Factors Driving Evolution 2
The Role of Geography in Human Adaptation
Early Human Height Estimation
Genetic Drift
Has Human Evolution Topped?
What will humans look like in 1 million years
Sickle Cell Anemia
Scientific American No, humans have not stopped evolving
---
All Wikipedia's Hello World Programs
Bell's Journals from Library of Congress
Wired on First Phone Call
First Telegram from Library of Congress
First Test Compacy Disc
Stephen Johnson What is a Tone Poem?
Houston Symphony on Strauss's Tone Poems
Boston Sympohony Orchestra on Alpine Symphony
NASA on Voyager Record
NASA on Pioneer Plaque
First MIR Message to Space
Ray Tomlinson's First Email
55: Evolving Electricity & What's "Women's Work"?
How did eels evolve electricity? And when is "women's work" neither women's nor work?
Images we Talk About:
Socks
More Socks
Thimble
Bag
Crochet Art
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:26) Evolving Electricity
(00:51:13) "Women's Work"
(01:38:46) Outro
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Happy moisturizer to all who celebrate, Ella’s just here for moral support, when did they put batteries in eels, someone's just statically charging these eels, what did we call electric eels before electricity? why would we think lightning and a fish are the same thing? the necrotizing torpedo and the torpor eel, Aristotle was a shite time traveler, “in all of humanity, if people think they can pout it up their asshole they will”, Allessandro Volta what a convenient name, electric fish gave us the battery not the other way around, the electric organ, when did electricity evolve? electric organ discharge, electrogenesis, it’s not an eel! get in line with the other animals that need their names fixed, 90% of an eel is electric organ, what does it feel like? turning fish to stone, shocks can function like a neurotoxin, the electric doublet can make fish twitch, Ella has a revelation, the physics is the biology, it’s all electric baby, magnetic animals 2 electric boogaloo, the domestic arts, This Woman’s Work, it was never always women’s work, old socks, but what does this have to do with men?? Ella predicts the British stealing a sock, male knitting guilds, knitting fishermen makes perfect sense, knitting was “compatible” with many kinds of life, mechanized knitting made it feminized, of course it’s always intersectionality, you know what’s appropriate for a woman is to do this thing we don’t need anymore, being demoted as an art form, “male art vs female craft”, Caroline’s just doing this topic to show their crochet is art, weaponizing the male ego to bring back knitting, bequeathing a valuable and symbolic thimble, Tom gets emotional over a salacious thimble, if that’s not art what is, also I can't believe you actually read all these thanks <3 - Tom, spinning bees to defy the British and seize the means of production, “Artists’ Suffrage League”, Faith Wilding and Harmony Hammond, craftivism, it’s not “women’s work” it’s “everyone’s art”.
Sources:
The Amazing Paper: The Torpedo Effect in Medicine
Atlantic on Electric Eels
Aristotle on Electric Eels
Greg Gbur on Electric Eels and Physics
Piccolino's Great Paper on the History of Volta's Experimentation
National Zoo Electric Eel Facts
NYTimes on Electric Eel Shocks
Tremendous Eel Behavior Writeup from Kenneth Catania
Reuters on Electric Eel Evolution
Science Paper on Electric Eel Evolution
Amber Plante on Electric Cells
Electric Bacteria
---
Melissa Hilliard Potter Talk
V&A: The history of hand-knitting
The Crafty Gentleman: The History of Knitting
This Is Gendered: Knitting
"2012 Paper: Knitting as Dissent: Female Resistance in America Since the
Revolutionary War"
Cooper Hewitt: A Revolution In Stockings
Brooklyn Museum: Women’s Work
Art Margins: Recrafting Futures: Feminist Practices of Material Engagement
V&A Blog: ‘A Stitch in Time: Home Sewing Before 1900’
NGV: The Power of ‘Women’s Work’: Craftivism
PBS: Stitch by Stitch, A Brief History of Knitting and Activism
University of Bath: #BreakTheBias: Is knitting a feminist issue?
Harpy: The Art of Embroidery
2014 Paper: Craftivism: The Role of Feminism in Craft Activism
The Daily Utah Chronical: Lien: Female Rebellion and Why Craft Matters
2016 Paper: Quiet Activism and the New Amateur
Recast: LLE on Creature Feature - The Bird Pee Technique
While we take our January break we're rebroadcasting our appearance on Creature Feature! Katie pulled out some of the wildest facts for us, so enjoy, thanks for your patience, and see y'all in 2 weeks!
New Year Q&A
It's our annual Q&A episode where we look back on 2023 and answer your questions to learn about our process, our favorite things, and each other!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Ella gets on the album, Dodie is very frog people music, pigeons fruit flies and sloths, our favorite topics of each others, black holes and microscopes and extinct animals, there’s one whole picture of Ella and Caroline, I need more than 5 seconds of this lady, Nessie Krampus and the Jersey Devil, Who the Hell is Edgar? the cursed 2nd spot in Eurovision, just do it! build a portfolio and experience and find local stuff in your area, alergic reaction to Tom’s joke, Australian Ella, card games, moved to tears by taskmaster, Skip & Loafer and Frieren, Baldur’s Gate is a 10/10, Caroline can read?? Under the Whispering Door and Life isn’t Binary, struggling through house of leaves, DRCL, Barbie and Evil Dead, i hate the sandpaper slide, field common questions, people do actually want to know about methodology, questions that are best answered by a different question, getting your own field explained to you, our school journeys, different kinds of learning, programming decision anxiety, getting to code for a thing you care about helps you learn, FUN! we’re actually ahead of schedule to learn everything, attacking Tom from different angles, seagul-gate, Ella producing with Jono in the studio, listening to Story Break at Lunch, let’s just say the Eras tour is going to be very interesting this year, putting it into the aether, if you want to change something you’ll do it tomorrow, the mellotron and babatone, distance, fun.
54: The HaLearnDay Extravaganza! 2023
It's the HaLearnDays! The time of year when we share gifts of fun facts from us and friends of the show!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
I wish Katie and Alex were real, pooping every 20 minutes, a human creates 320 pounds of poop a year, when I think about dangerous, “when I think of dangerous bird boop”, cube pooped saves on the poly count, poopin and pleasin, Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought, smuggling instruments to space, sonic boooooms, this is obviously a Caroline gift, The National Christmas Tree Association, liberals want you to burn your christmas trees, the ACTA is very different from the NCTA, bury me with my artificial tree in a cemetery under an artificial lawn, rudely scrutinizing a gift from Hank, Caroline’s read The Grinch who Re-tabulated a Fact they Got, $25 Barns & Noble Gift Card, Caroline and Ella negotiate money from Tom, identifying unwrapped baked goods in Japan, hot cross buns and melanoma, Ella Laterals us, British Scorpios can’t give blood in the US, we all definitely remember Ella was born in Germany, “destroying” cows, Janet pulled out all the stops with the science, vibrissae, wash bears, Ella ones up her fly sperm fact with Kangaroo Vaginas, whaaat’s the deal with the third vagina, false cloaca, kangaroos can house 3 kids at the same time, Ella’s in her kangaroo vagina era, our first favorite Tom piss on pity, running over Christ Tarrant’s foot, plougs and shootouts, should all our fun facts be forgot and days of old lang syne.
Sources:
Goose Poop
Goose Poop 2 Electric Boogaloo
How much do human poop?
Why do geese poop so much?
Wombat Poop
Guiness World Records on First Song in Space
Pavel Popovych
Nasa Wakeup Calls History
Smithsonian Mag on Schirra & Stafford
Harmonica from Gemini
Cleo's Video on Supersonic Flight
Soil Association: Real VS Fake
Washington Post: Are Real or Artificial Christmas Trees Better for the Environment?
NOAA Sperm Whale Info
UN FAO Data on Human Seafood Consumption
Lower Estimate of Whale Population
Higher Estimate of Whale Population
Sabrina's RomCom Video
People: When Harry Met Sally
New Yorker: The Pastry AI That Learned to Fight Cancer
Varsity: What do Bread and Cancer Cells Have in Common?
FDA Blood Donation Ban
UTexas on Raccoon Brains
Raccoon Brains Compared to Other Animals
PGC on Raccoons
1963 Paper on Dabbling
Kangaroos have 3 vaginas
Bob the Fish Video Essay on ITV Telethon
Barbara Lisicki "The Day we Pissed on Pity"
NDACA on the Block Telethon Protest
Disabled People's Archive on Block Telethon
53: Making Superheavy Elements, and Celebrating Public Domain Day
What are the superheavy elements, and how did we make them? And what is public domain day, and why is next year's going to be so interesting?
Things we Talk About:
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:17) Superheavy Elements
(00:37:41) Public Domain Day
(01:19:19) Outro
We also learn about:
It’s like we’re in school again, ordering the periodic table before discovering the electron, Mendelev didn't even like electrons, the nucleus is an atomic juggling act, atomic high jinks, the Fermi paradox, the Fermi problem, the number of piano tuners in Chicago, smashing elements into new ones, that’s why it’s called nuclear physics, receiving a Nobel and then fleeing Italy then learning your Nobel was wrong, accidentally discovering nuclear fission instead, we all so Barbie we knew this was leading to bombs, uranium neptunium plutonium, nobody cared because they didn’t want to draw attention to this during WORLD WAR 2, how does this keep happening i thought i was smart, the radioactive avengers, metropolis, I only scream about ice cream for anticapitalist purposes, none of this is legal advice, you know the patent stealing guy Edison, trademarks patents and copyright, JK Rowling patented a new kind of transphobia, the US constitution mentions copyright, the Micky Mouse Curve, even Bobel winning economists agree copyright extension is bad, happy hbomberguy video day, YouTube sucks at Fair Use, Mr Boop, Night of the Living Dead on Wikipedia, we’re IP pilled, SO MANY DISNEY MOVIES ARE BASED ON PUBLIC DOMAIN STORIES, it’s not open season on Mickey, “he can be naughty”, canine enthusiasm is unprotectable by copyright, Pride and Prejudice but Mr Darcy is a Vape God, Frank Capra is proud that It’s a Wonderful Life grew in the public domain, “battle lines will have to be drawn”, which two elements would YOU smoosh together?
Sources:
Superheavy by Kit Chapman
How to read the periodic table
Fermi Paradox
Fermi Problem
Timeline of chemical element discoveries
---
Jennifer Jenkins' Amazing Post on Public Domain Day
Jennifer Jenkins Duke Law Article on Public Domain Day
US Patent and Trademark Office on Definitions
JK Rowling is a Terf
More JK Rowling is a Terf
Association of Research Libraries on Copyright Timeline
NYTimes on Mickey Mouse Entering Public Domain
The Mickey Mouse Curve
Economists Argument Against Copyright Extension
Variety's Review of Steamboat Willie
Nebula Founder Dave Wiskus on Fair Use
EFF on Public Domain
Verge on Enola Holmes Copyright
Argument Presented Against Enola Holmes
The Public Domain Review
Florence Welch Gatsby Musical
Dick Cody Heese Video
BBC: It's a Wonderful Life's Public Domain Journey
Wallace McLean's First Email about Public Domain Day
Karyn Temple on Public Dommain
Submit Your Q&A Questions!
Submit your questions for our end of year Q&A episode at letslearneverything.com/question or in our discord!
52: Amy Westervelt, Carbon Capture, and the Cartoonishly Evil Atlas Network
Investigative journalist Amy Westervelt from Drilled asks us: what is carbon capture and is it good or bad or... complicated? What is the Atlas Network and why are they comically evil dark avengers of the climate world? And how do you go from recording a podcast in your car to creating an award winning podcast network?
🎤 See Tom perform comedy in Brooklyn for Earth Alliance! 🎤
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:14) Carbon Capture
(00:39:05) The Atlas Network/Podcasting
(01:08:25) Outro
We also learn about:
Emailing the local radio station “Would you like an over-aged intern”, Ella’s a climate change fan, natural carbon capture, compressed carbon is a lot more dangerous than it sounds, fracking with captured carbon, “there’s a lot of creative math happening”, direct air capture, carbon capture needs to happen WITH decarbonization, warming waters make crabs produce neurotoxins, unfreezing zombie viruses, a silver lining to the climate catastrophe is the worm broth, moving the goalposts to 2050, historian of past futures, people used to think fridges were weird, are we just giving up on eating slightly less meat, greenwashing, if you’re an oil company everything looks like a pipeline or a combustion engine, direct air capture is actually cool! even if I have 0 silver bullets I can kill a werewolf with 100 brass bullets, Anthony Fisher battery farming turtles origin story, reader’s digest version of Friedrich Hayek, having an evil meeting in a chicken battery farm, now they’re cooking with gas, Margaret Thatcher’s cameo, “what a horrible avengers this has been”, THEY LITERALLY INVENTED THE OVERTON WINDOW, they’re a real life conspiracy theory, Amy gets in a debate, “I have a very difficult mother so tense conversations, I’m good at them”, narratives in climate not just look at my chart! podcasts can communicate the people hidden in stories, producing a podcast in a car, “I want people to come away really pissed off”
Sources:
Mississippi Carbon Capture Accident
IPCC Carbon Capture Report
Latest IPCC Report
Nature: "Carbon dioxide removal is an ineffective time machine"
The New Report on when we’ll Cross the 1.5 Degree Threshold
Thawed Zombie Bug Viruses
Revived Worm Broth
Drilled on The Atlas Network
51: Carcinization, The Animal Algorithm Mystery, and The Many Lemming Lies w/ Ellen Weatherford
Are we really all destined to turn into crabs? Why are there so many animal algorithms, and are they all legit? And just how many times have we been wrong about the lemming?
Things we talk about:
All the Crabs Caroline mentions
The Big List of Animal Algorithms
Boid Video
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:03) Carcinization
(00:42:00) The Animal Algorithm Mystery
(01:25:46) The Many Lemming Lies
(01:45:35) Outro
We also learn about: Endless forms most crab-like, the 2020 meme boom of carcinization, what is the extent of the carcinization crisis, watch it buddy you already got eight legs, hamburger style arthropod, BOY CAN I CAROLINE I'M GLAD YOU ASKED, it’s like CNN and Fox agreeing on something, crabs have ten legs my dude, vikavolt, crabs and false crabs and true Christians, its all human labels at the end of the day, crab shapes have evolved at least 5 times, the king, masked, coconut, and hermit crab, Ellen’s thinking like a crab, the leaf eating mangrove crab, the crab shape is good for many niches, guard your tasty bits, decarcinization, we should try decarcinizating our market share, I am THE crab researcher and y’all need to calm down, convergent evolution is like video game controller design, the Brazilian Aardvark, Ellen’s uncovering of this dark underbelly, this algorithm list is just a list of sleeper activation words, what is a metaheuristic swarm optimization algorithm? Craig Reynold’s Boids, the lateral line system, “ants aren’t smart, any colonies are”, multidimensional ants, coatis moving in the jth dimension, this is all super niche you can’t use multidimensional ants for every problem, no articles are talking about this this is Defunctland niche, Groth and the 2 Fairies, lots of these papers are not at all based on real biology, “cats do not form swarms”, the bee marriage algorithm is actually good! research for research’s sake is okay, lower your pitchforks but keep your pitchforks at the ready, things are shitty starting out i mean we named everything crabs, political cartoonists went wild for lemmings, we’ve been making shit up about lemmings for year, lemmings falling from the sky, Ole Worm’s pet coati, Popular Science’s lemmings returning to Lemuria, lemming population booms, lemmings are good swimmers, a truck full of the wrong species of lemmings, ALBERTA IS LAND LOCKED, lemmings are fight or fight, lemmings don’t explode, let’s unlearn everything about lemmings
Sources:
TheConversation: Carcinization
Know Your Meme: Carcinization
NPR: Would Aliens Look Like Us?
PBS Eons: Carcinization Video
Natural History Museum: Convergent Evolution
2017 Paper: The Evolution of Eyes: Major Steps.
2019 Paper: A Phylogenomic Framework, Evolutionary Timeline and Genomic Resources for Comparative Studies of Decapod Crustaceans
2021 Paper- How to Become a Crab: Phenotypic Constraints on a Recurring Body Plan
Conservancy.org: The mangrove Tree Crab
Scientific America: Carcinization
1997 Paper: Carcinization in the Anomura - Fact or Fiction?
PopSci: Carcinization
---
The Coati Algorithm Paper
List of Animal Algorithms
Craig Reynold's Boid Paper
Boids in Film
Ant Colony Optimization
Southwest Airlines' Ant Algorithm
The Amazing Review from Tzanetos & Dounias
---
Lemmings from the Sky
Ole Worm
The Museum Wormianum
Popular Science's Lemuria Claims
Snopes on Disney's Lemming Film
More on Diseny's Lemming Film
49: Goosebumps, (Not) Alien Pyramids, and Nessie & Cryptids
Why do we get goosebumps when we hear nails on a chalkboard? Obviously aliens didn't make the pyramids, but how were they made and what does that teach us about humanity? And what's the story behind nessie and why the queer community loves cryptids?
Things we talk about:
Egyptian painting of using water to pull a statue
Video of modern people pulling a block
The famous Nessie photograph
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:59) Goosebumps
(00:48:43) Not Alien Pyramids
(01:23:13) Nessie and Cryptids
(01:50:50) Outro
We also learn about:
The bumpies you get on your skinnies, the gem trade can be pretty shitty!, Tom read 5 books for this, ahhhh! oh wait have I got goosebumps? the many and few names for goosebumps, piloerection, I just got objective chills, animal goosebumps, famous geologist and pigeon lover Charles Darwin, “I took a stuffed snake to the monkey house”, porcupine piloerection, gustatory stimuli, grima, it’s not ew it’s euggghh, Easy Lovery by Phil collins, Screaming Ape; Loop. the Head Wizard tm, biomimicry, nails on a chalkboard, Scraping Sounds and Disgusting Noises, (SOUNDBITE OF FINGERNAILS ON CHALKBOARD), so is that better or worse? I guess the kids are listening to screeching sounds for music, prehistoric chalkboard monster, ruining Ella’s spooky cold open, 118 pyramids! you’re both racist! when did the ancient aliens theory stated, von Daniken’s racist conspiracy, the racism in believing only wwhite people could make architecture, plumbobs! moving 5000 pound limestone blocks, the genius post ramp system, it took 100 years to realize the painting was showing how to move stuff with water, Gregory Marouard’s demonstration of moving a block, the Nile used to run right by the Giza pyramids, the mundane power of having a lot of people, 20,000 people to build the great pyramids, the oldest papyrus ever found: the diary of merer, the pyramid builders weren’t slaves, the bent pyramid, the plesiosaur, cryptids that turned out to be real like the thylacinem, fake cryptids, cryptid comes from cryptozoology in the 80s, Nessie swimming down the nile, you gotta try Irn Bru, Columba the Monk’s encounter with nessie from the 565 AD, Columba was a dual class monk cleric, Marmaduke’s hoaxes, hippo leg umbrella, the Nessie-sary search, eDNA, you pee you poop you die, eels in the loch, cryptids and the queer community, cyptids are the people’s mythology, token straight scientist friend.
Sources:
The Biology of Fear
Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Porcupine Piloerection
The Psychological study of Emotional Piloerection
Chills in Different Sensory Domains
The emotion of Grima
Scraping Sounds and Disgusting Noises
NPR Chalkboard Transcripts
Psychoacoustics of a Chilling Sound
Psychoacoustics of Chalkboad Squeaking
Anatomy of the Ear
---
Medium Article on the "impossibility" of Giza Pyramids
The great pyramid of Giza
Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens
Tools Used in Ancient Egyptian Construction
Ancient Ramps
Using the Nile for blocks
Sliding Friction on Dry and Wet Sand
The Diary of Merer Papyri
---
Cryptozoology Museum: What is Cryptozoology?
National Catholic Register: Story of the Loch Ness Monster
University of Aberdeen: The Picts
Highland Pictish Trail: Pictish Stones
New York Times: Loch Ness Fiction is Stranger than Truth
Loch Ness Sightings Website
Science Focus: eDNA and Loch Ness
The Guardian: eDNA and giant eels
Daily Mail: Psychology of Loch Ness Monster Believers
Nessie is My Girlfriend! Cryptids and Queer People
Vox "How the Babadook became the LGBTQ icon we didn’t know we needed"
Cryptid Queer Icons
50: 🎂 The Ig Nobel Prize, The 2023 Ig Nobel Winners, and the Ig Nobel Peace Prize
For our 2nd anniversary and our 50th episode (which it definitely is, don't check) we cooperatively tackled a topic folks have been asking us to do for ages: The Ig Nobel Prize!
Check out our new merch! Hats! Posters! Mugs!
Images and Videos we talk about:
The Levitating Frog Video
The Best of Miss Sweetie Poo
Ocean Mixing Anchovy Diagram
The Grabbing Tentacle Robot Video
Necrobotic Spider Diagram
Necrobotic Spider Video
The Juke 8
Daisuke Practicing his Speech
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:08:18) The Ig Nobel Prize
(00:45:00) The 2023 Ig Nobel Winners
(01:28:36) The Ig Nobel Peace Prize
(01:59:09) Outro
We also learn about:
Tom does an evil scientist laugh at Atto Seconds, Ella watch hours of Ig ceremonies, honoring achievements that make people laugh then think, the rotating category, six people have turned down the Nobel, comedy? with a question mark? trying to purposefully win an Ig is like recreating The Room, Limburger cheese, Andre Geim loves his Ig as much as his Nobel, “if people don’t have a very good sense of humor, they are usually not very good scientists either”, Roy Glauber the keeper of the broom ALSO WON A NOBEL, “all they wanted to ask about was that damn broom”, the 24/7 Lectures, Mandelbrot goading miss sweetie poo, Ella’s Favorite Ig-ventions, partially unboiling an egg on stage, Chernobyl Bra Face Masks, that laughing and crying human emotion, cadaver nose hairs with surprisingly few nose hair variations, we all stan replication, Tom’s dad was robbed of the Ig, boring teachers, backwards speakers, maybe their neurons work backwards, the taste of rocks, the trick condition, electric taste, sexism in the stanford toilet, statistically significant anchovy boning affecting the water column, the fish kama sutra, how can i turn that dead spider into a robot? necrobotics is surprisingly easy, anti peace prizes, Pauling’s Nobel burn on Teller, Tom gets recognized, Lal Bihari’s schemes to become undead, “Lal bihari died in 1976 but he is feeling much better”, MAMAAAA OOOoooOOOH, sweet caroline, working as a waitress, karaoke means empty orchestra, Shigeichi Negishi’s first machine, Inoue’s Juke 8 origin story, Inoue is up there with Jonas Salk for not patenting Karaoke, Inoue’s Ig Nobel standing ovation, I’m not going to cry, I just started crying what the fuck, don't tell Ella but Toms my favorite, sometimes three ding dongs can make a podcast
Sources:
About the Ig Nobels
Marc Abrahams articles
Andrew Geim
Limburger Cheese
Keeper of the Broom
Miss Sweetie Poo
Best of Miss Sweetie Poo
Wired Article: A Gala for Weird Science
Mark Hosteetler
2019 Awards - Very Fun Watch
2015 Awards - Even more Fun
24/7 Lectures
Past winners
Michigan Driving Law
The Blaster
Bra Gas Mask
---
Nose Hairs
Crowd Effects of Looking Up
Bored Students and Teachers
Ars Technica on the Igs
Brain Patterns of Speaking Backwards
Eating Fossils
Jamais Vu and Semantic Satiation
Electric Chopsticks
The Stanford Toilet
Ocean Mixing from Spawning Fish
Necrobotic Spider Grippers
---
Marc Abrahams Nobel Thoughts Interview with Linus Pauling
Stanley Cohen Nobel Thoughts Interview
NYTimes on Lal Bihari
Lal Bihari's Ig Nobel Ceremony
Matt Alt on Shigeichi Negishi's First Karaoke Machine for Kotaku
Daisuke Inoue's Story told for Topic Magazine
Time Magazine on Daisuke Inoue
Daisuke Inoue's Ig Nobel Ceremony
48: Wikipedia w/ Annie Rauwerda, The First Boring Number, and Perpetual Stew
We all use Wikipedia, but how did it come to be? What's the first number to not have a Wikipedia page, and what does that say about math and humans? And what on Earth is Perpetual Stew?
Follow Annie and Depths of Wikipedia on Instagam/Twitter/Tiktok!
Images we talk about:
Sloane's Gap
nostalgia.wikipedia.com
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:33) The History of Wikipedia
(00:50:16) The First Boring Number
(01:12:09) Wikimania and Perpetual Stew
(01:50:38) Outro
We also learn about: there’s more Wikipedia languages than google translate, Grendel would have loved Blackpink, how often do we think about the roman empire, the first encyclopedia was very wrong, all men think about is present Rome! Pliny’s child piss ab wrinkle cure, fortune did not favor the bold according to Pliny the younger, the encyclopedia Britannica, getting lazy on the later letter installments, door to door encyclopedia salesmen, Annie’s Mom’s excitement for the new encyclopedia, Encarta the forgotten digital encyclopedia, welcome to the 90s baby, webrings, soft core porn is the carcinization of the web, Jimmy Wale’s “Guy Oriented Search Engine” Bomis.com, the failed boring Nupedia, the wiki prefix from a Hawaiian bus, Cunningham’s Law, Wikipedia’s Bro culture, nostalgia.wikipedia.com, no search or sources on old wikipedia, it’s not easy but people were making this encyclopedia, this human element has always been a part of encyclopedias, Jimmy Wales got his admin privilages revoked by the community, the interesting number paradox, Ramanujan’s Taxi Cab Numbers, the OEIS sequence database, Sloane’s Gap, 20,067 sitting alone at lunch, a surprising recent number update, the notability standard of numbers, the highest negative number to not have a page is only negative 3!!! come to the dark side of the zero, the Wikimania, Annie is Taylor Swift at Wikimania, Ella’s years long Wikipedia War, Annie’s neuroscience journey, Annie’s Perpetual Stew, a stew love.
Sources:
Andrew Lih's Book "The Wikipedia Revolution"
Pliny the Elder's Encyclopedia with Sun Shade Feet People
History of the Encyclopedia Britannica
The Encarta Encyclopedia
The "Decline" of Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales Guy Raz Interview
---
Scientific American The Most Boring Number
Ramanujan's Taxi Cab Numbers
The OEIS
Sloane's Gap Paper
The Notability Requirements for Number Pages
---
Wikimania
NYTimes on Perpetual Stew
47: The Abyssopelagic Zone, The Crystal Healing Boom, and Time Capsules
What lies below the depths of the sea... and why should we stop being so afraid of it? Okay we know crystals can't heal you, but could they actually do... something? And why are time capsules more complicated than you'd think, and why should we love them anyway?
Images/Videos we talk about:
New Yorker Comic about the Deep Sea
The Phantom Jellyfish (warning for Thalassophobia)
The Venus Flow Basket Sponge
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:04) The Abyssopelagic Zone
(00:54:21) The Crystal Healing Boom
(01:26:19) Time Capsules
(01:54:18) Outro
We also learn about: The Zones of the Ocean, the midnight zone, the hadal zone in the trenches, Tom forgets that water freezes, cold water and thermal vents, pompeii worm’s bacterial jacket, chemosynthesis, the deep see adaptation alarm, pisolite, it’s a myth that more people have been to space than the bottom of the ocean, the challenger deep, deep sea and moon exploration were happening around the same time, we actually DO know more about the sea than the moon, the abyssal plains is half the planet… but people don’t care, thalassophobia, there are no amateur deep sea explorers, the enigmitization of the deep sea, deep sea gigantism, why not visit the deep and eat delicious foot long shrimp, phantom jellyfish, venus flower baskets symbiosis is WILD, 500 sea pigs facing in the same direction, the burglar alarm atolla jellyfish, artificial E Jelly lure, gelatinous little guys, “i thought that bit was gonna be way better than it was”, lateral line, the cusk eel is the deepest fish, whales dive deeper to send messages farther, marine snow, Ella pulls a Caroline, deep sea nodule mining, we can still like things and not believe in them scientifically, crystals DON'T date to ancient Egypt, amethyst hangover cure, to be fair they didn’t even know what crystals were, bad economic or healthcare pressures may push folks to crystals, crystals do actually have vibrational properties just not those kinds! the piezoelectric effect, quartz watches and pickups, paranormal powers placebo or priming, a great psych experiment where no one had to take LSD, we love a repeatable study, the real benefits of crystals from placebo and community, confirmation bias is powerful and good, actually harmful crystals, don’t give babies crystals for teething, gems are just shiny, you can ship of theseus the voyager topic from every time we mention it, foundation deposits weren’t exactly time capsule but were cool, leaving notes in houses, Time Capsules are optimistic and kind of silly, the dissappointed norweigan time capsule kids, deciding what to put in a capsule is really really tricky, what is sublime and what is trivial? taking a picture of a polroid, the interesting complications of time capsules, the time travel fever, “artificial special collections”, Tom’s own time capsule from 6th grade, good teachers are so good. Caroline’s gonna cry again!
Sources:
The Deep Ocean: Life in the Abyss
The Abyssal Zone
How Do Animals Survive in the Deep Ocean?
Chemosynthesis
We Know More About the Moon
We Know More About the Moon 2
Gene Feldman
Fear and loathing of the deep ocean: why don't people care about the deep sea?
"Venus Flower Basket "
Eye in the Sea
How We Found the Giant Squid
Human Impact
Species in the CCZ
---
The Guardian: American Anxiety Drives A Crystal Boom
Oprah Daily: Healing Crystals
Stanford: Understanding People's Obsession with Crystals
Time: Do Crystals Work
Livescience: Crystal Healing
OED: Amethyst
Robert Boyle: An Essay About the Origine & Virtues of Gems
1981 Paper: Piezoelectric Effects in Quartz-Rich Rocks
Piezoelectricity and Its Applications
2008 Paper: Prescribing “placebo treatments”: results of national survey of US internists and rheumatologists
The New England Journal of Medicine: Why Unconventional Medicine?
2010 Paper: Mystical Stones in Oncology: Crystal Healing Power or Perfect Nonsense?
Stanford Medicine: Patient Mindset Matters in Healing and Deserves More Study
Forbes Health: Healing Crystals
Nationwide Children's: The Dangers of Amber Teething Necklaces
IGS: Gemstone Toxicity Table
---
William E Jarvis Paper on Time Capsules
Egyptian Foundation Deposits
Matt Novak Interview on Time Capsules
Boring Norwegian Time Capsule
Atlantic's "The Paradox of Time Capsules"
History of Westinghouse Time Capsule
The Book Inside the Westinghouse Time Capsule
Science Reporting on the Westinghouse Time Capsule
The Local Michigain Time Capsule
46: Lawn Loathing, Spelling Psammophile, and Guinness World Records
Why are lawns so bad, and what could we grow instead? How much can we learn from an esoteric word like Psammophile? And why is the Guinness Book of World Records wonderful and terrible at the same time?
Images/Videos we talk about:
Snakes in Sand
The Jerboa/Kangaroo Rat/Kangaroo Mouse
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:44) Lawn Loathing
(00:45:55) Spelling Psammophile
(01:19:26) Guinness World Records
(01:50:38) Outro
We also learn about: lawn enjoyer (derogatory), there are 6x more lawn than corn in the US, how we developed our lawn fetish in the 17th century, the pesticide and fertilizer boom after WWII, the more money and knowledge you have the worse lawns get for the environment, runoff powered sargassum seaweed, 30% of drinking water used for lawns, lawns aren’t even the best greenery for your mental health, “your granny cant push the lawnmower around” okay I don’t want her too! astroturf is even worse, when the sun engulfs the earth all that will remain is our plastic lawns, the no-mow-movement, the alternative lawn movement, make an animal crossing lawn! Ella and Caroline fail the spelling bee, what makes a word tricky, 3 letter words are the trickiest, Ella steals the word, ventifacts, sand actually holds water better, granular physics in a scorpion paper, sidewinder snakes drifting while doing the worm, snake scale fingerprint, ecomorphological convergence, the adorable Jerboa or Kangaroo Rat are in Dune unchanged, Jerboas can kick sand onto traps, foot drumming, “the rats would rather drum than fight”, sandy fungi, our childhood obsessions with Guinness records, people are weird! the origin of the Guinness World Records, I’ll prove to them who’s the fastest bird! the eccentric fact finding twin brothers, may we hope to turn heat into light”, the 4 types of Guinness world record, marketing records, the analog to digital downfall, over half of the top 100 brands have records, Guinness is a native advertising company, brands really need empowering, laundering governments apolitcally, most lightning strikes to a person, a good record makes you wonder
Sources:
Scientific American: The American Obsession with Lawns
BBC: Should People Get Rid of Their Garden Lawns?
Gardens Illustrated: The History of Lawns
Psychology Today: The Strange Pstchology of the American Lawn
The Guardian: Lawns Are Such A Yawn
JSTOR: Your Green Lawn is Harming the Environment
2015 Paper: Lawn as a cultural and ecological phenomenon: A conceptual framework for transdisciplinary research
2020 Paper: Lawns in Cities: From a Globalised Urban Green Space Phenomenon to Sustainable Nature-Based Solutions
2005 Paper: Mapping and modeling the biogeochemical cycling of turf grasses in the United States
NSF: Are Our Lawns Biological Deserts?
2023 Paper: Rewilding in Miniature: Suburban Meadows Can Improve Soil Microbial Biodiversity and Soil Health
Scientific American: How Fertilizers Harm Earth More Than Help Your Lawn
2017 Paper: Is All Urban Green Space the Same? A Comparison of the Health Benefits of Trees and Grass in New York City
The Guardian: Turf It Out: Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Artificial Grass?
PlantLife: No Mow May
BBC: No Mow May Blamed for Rise in Hedgehog Injuries
University of Cambridge: Can An Iconic Meadow Seed Wider Change?
---
538 Article on Spelling Bee Data
Joseph White on Word Selection Process
The Wikipedia Page for Psammophile
Amazing Paper on Psammophile Ecology and Scorpions
Energy Cost of Walking/Running on Sand
NYTimes on Sidewinder Snakes
Sidewinder Ecology
Sidewinder Microscopic Scale Differences
Jerboa Evasiveness
Jerboa Foot Drumming
Kangaroo Rat Ecology
Psammophile Fungi
---
3 Months on a RollerCoaster
Imogen West Knights Guardian Article
Vox Article
Planet Money Podcast: Is Record Breaking Broken
Guinness Marketing
In the Interest of Fairness
Turkmenistan Controversy
Guinness response to John Oliver
Find Guinness Records Here
45: Superseded Science, why is TB Still a Thing, and the Radium Girls
What previous scientific theories would turn into the ones we know today, and what can they teach us? Why is Tuberculosis still a thing in the modern age? And who were the Radium girls, and what did they give us?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Oh Fuck Tom and Ella and Caroline, theory vs pseudoscience, scientific glow up, the LLE game show theme, any time Tom isn’t talking he’s doing a little dance, preformationism, tiny growing dinosaur gametes, miasma, spontaneous generation, the amber effect, Darwin couldn’t sleep thinking about geology, what a nerd, the expanding earth, every theory can be explained by little expanding dinosaurs, Marie Tharp’s “Girl Talk, revisiting Vulcan, planet mnemonics, Ella snipes the answer, an actual Einstein name drop, Einstein was so excited to think he could solve the mercury problem, my topic superseded yours, what is Tuberculosis, TB is at least 9,000 years old, when TB was romanticized (by the wealthy), “how interesting he looks in dying”, TOM STOP DANCING!, people think this is a disease of old but it’s not, antibacterial resistance could be as big a threat as climate change, 1 Billion people have latent TB, the real enemy once again is capitalism, novel’s rapid test, there’s no Return on Investment with TB research, unless you patent the cure, J&J COULD SELL IT FOR A QUARTER AND STILL MAKE A PROFIT, only 40,000 people have received bedaquiline in 11 years, evergreening a patent is Sinister, amnesty period of science in the misc topic, even with nobel prizes scientists didn't realize how dangerous this stuff was, the Curies are buried in led coffins, Curie’s legacy is “literally untouchable”, Will It Radium? Radium Schokolade, it’s rejuvenating! radium quackery, radium silk, the government said it MUST have radium if you’re advertising it does, alpha radiation mostly hurts when ingested, glowing radium dust dresses, surely THIS is how they got poisoned right?? touching the brush to the lips was a cost saving measure, radiation poisoning sucks, the US radium corp claimed the women were just suffering from syphilis, hiding scientific investigations, the radium girls fight against capitalism and make labor history, radium girls lead to an international nuclear treaty, but they still sold radium tonics! Byers’ photograph helped ban radithol, the podcast make you old.
Sources:
Wikipedias list of Superseded Theories
Miasma
Spontaneous Generation
Thomas Browne's Origins of Electricity
Excerpt on Amber from Yamamoto's "The Pull Of History"
Scientific American on Darwin's Geology
Cathy Barton on Expanding Earth Theory
Marie Tharp
How Le Verrier came to Believe in Vulcan
Royal Society: The Eclipse that Verified Einstein
Nat Geo & Thomas Levenson on Vulcan and Einstein
---
TB Pathology
Tuberculosis: A Fashionable Disease?
9000 Year Old TB
The Other Pandemic
Treating TB
Diagnosing TB
Novel Chegou
Bedaquiline Approval
Bedaquiline Efficacy
Bedaquiline Cost
Bedaquiline patent
---
Science Museum Group: The Radium Girls
Britannica: Radium
Britannica: Marie Curie
Nobel Prize: Marie Curie Physics awards
Nobel Prize: Marie Curie- Overview
The Atlantic: How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer
Nature Chemistry: The Realities of Radium
CNN: When Beauty Products Were Radioactive
Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity: Radithor
Britannica: Radium Girls
Library of Congress Blogs: Radium Girls
The Radium Girls Websit
Inside Hook: Radium Girls Legacy
NPR: Radium Girls Legacy
44: Katie Goldin & Alex Schmidt, Space Birds, and the Bison Emoji 🦬
Special guests Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin from Secretly Incredibly Fascinating and Creature Feature answer: Have birds ever been to space? Why does Katie love birds so much? And how did Alex bring about the bison emoji to everyone's phones?
Things we Talk About:
The Quails in Space video we watched over and over
The Club Winged Manakin's "Call"
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Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:13) Space Birds
(00:38:46) Birds & Bison Emoji
(00:54:59) Outro
We also learn about:
Birds have home field advantage here, DIY animal behavior major, baby elephant soccer coach, a big podcast stew, why can’t birds just fly to space, we all share one brain cell, the Karman line, Ruppell's griffon vulture once flew into a jet engine, or rather the engine ate the bird, vultures are actually clean birds, high altitude vultures have blood adaptations, don’t dope vulture blood, USA lost the birds in space race, space farming, cloacal docking with the ISS, the quails in space video breaks us, who will teach the first generation of space quails? Chernobyl birds, stop doing unjustified wars and send chernobyl birds to space, Chix in Space, Katie wants to put a hummingbird in space, Canadian goose alien, Katie’s childhood Wile E Cayoe trap, birds relatable alien adorably arrogant dinosaurs, club winged manakin stridulation calls, Alex’s 18 page bison proposal, bird aliens return to the feet of a bison emoji statue, how Katie met Alex, Katie’s Peanuts comics, all great friendships start with an amazing bit.
Sources:
Audubon: The Amazing Story of the Cold War Space-Egg Race
Audubon's Initially Mistaken Blog on Space Birds
Smithsonian on Bird Flight Height
Smithsonian Zoo on Ruppell's Griffon Vulture
Nasa on the Edge of Space
Cornell Bird Lab on Japanese Quail
43: Gravitational Waves, The Loneliest Animal, and Graffiti
How long have we been searching for Gravitational Waves? What is the loneliest animal, and what does it mean to be lonely? And what really makes graffiti... graffiti?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:26) Gravitational Waves
(00:41:01) The Loneliest Animal
(01:14:17) Graffiti
(01:45:21) Outro
We also learn about:
Invisible ripples in spacetime that move at the speed of light and squeeze and stretch spacetime, Aristotle would have lost his mind at gravitational waves, Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity is bends in spacetime, Einstein’s 1915 prediction, gravitational waves are stupid… unless? pulsars are cosmic lighthouses, binary pulsars are two bowling balls dropped in a lake that we think are big enough to ripple to our shore, Einstein predicted them and then we found them, I found a math drawing in space, LIGO finding gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein’s theory, thank you Yano, gravitational waves click with Caroline, LIGO can measure 1/10,000th the width of a proton, measuring the collision of 2 black holes 1.3 billion years ago, International Pulsar Timing Array, the hum of the universe, the background hum of hundreds of thousands of black holes merging, hypothetical one dimensional cosmic strings, i thought you said this was silly, have you ever been alone in a crowded room, "I want to know what loneliness is to you Ella”, the elusive snow leopard, “just tell me how snow leopards fuck Caroline”, lonely ants live 11 times shorter, giving mirrors to make cows less lonely, the song of the Kauai Oo, lonesome George sold out, Albert the Albatross’s theme song, Albie the Albatross, finding 52 Blue the whale from declassified hydrophones, capitalism isolates animals too! are we projecting and processing loneliness onto conservation, Tom’s contractual Carly Rae Jepsen mention, graffiti used to only mean ancient graffiti, farts for the old man, I am Hiyya! Lysias is Handsome, is graffiti art? Kilroy was here, Faulkner wants to write a Kilroy was here, remember the writer and the reader and me, transient and permanent graffiti, NYC Subway Graffiti, “How did they do that?!”, graffiti as high art, Ivan + Hayley, local graffiti, Taki 183, Warren Robinett’s Atari graffiti, fuck you I was here
Sources:
LIGO: What are gravitational waves?
The History of Gravitational Waves
Pulsars
What is LIGO
LIGO 2015 Discovery
Cosmic Chirps
NANOGrav
International Pulsar Timing Array
Pulsar Timing Arrays
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set
Cosmic Strings
---
Snow Leopard Trust
2022 Paper: Neurobiology of Loneliness, Isolation, and Loss: Integrating Human and Animal Perspectives
2015 Paper: Social Isolation Causes Mortality by Disrupting Energy Homeostasis in Ants
2019 Paper: Can Access to an Automated Grooming Brush and/or a Mirror Reduce Stress of Dairy Cows Kept in Social Isolation?
Forbes: Companion Parrots May Be Less Lonely When They Phone Their Feathered Friends
Galapagos Conservancy: Lonesome George
Smithsonian: Spix’s Macaw
The Call of the Kauai Oo
BBC: No Romance for Lovesick Albatross
RSPB: The Black-browed Albatross, Albie, at RSPB Bempton Cliffs
The Guardian: Albie the Albatross
NOS: Why Do Whales Make Sounds?
Smithsonian: Maybe the World’s Loneliest Whale Isn’t So Isolated, After All
The Guardian: The Search for the Loneliest Whale in the World
PBS: Ship Noises Mute the Songs of Humpback Whales
2018 Paper: Change in Singing Behavior of Humpback Whales Caused by Shipping Noise
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UCL Jeanine Ancelet on History of Graffiti
Penn Museum on Mayan Graffiti
ASOR on Ancient Near East Graffiti
Smithsonian Mag on Pompeii Graffiti
IAS on the Athenodoros Graffiti
Boston College Pompeii Graffiti Translation
Museum of Cycladic Art
Tim O Gorman on Kilroy
William Falkner at UVA Q&A Transcript
History of American Graffiti Authors on PBS
Colosseum Graffiti
Harvard International Review on Banksy
NYT Interview with Taki183
Adam Clayton's Letter to Atari
Robinett on Adventure Easter Egg
Wired Interview with Robinett
42: Gender Complexity, Mars Water Deja Vu, and Pigeons
How complicated is trying to scientifically study gender? Why does it feel like water get discovered on Mars every other month? And what's so great about these pigeons I see everywhere?
Images we talk about:
The Brain Gender Chart
The Jacobin Pigeon
The Pouter Pigeon
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:38) Gender Complexity
(00:42:27) Mars Water Deja Vu
(01:18:16) Pigeons
(01:38:21) Outro
We also learn about:
Caroline snipes Tom’s joke, let’s talk about sex, “I do it and I have one”, sex is a bimodal distribution, defining sex is like defining a tree, have you ever had a gender that… that…, women men girls and boys, gender as separate from sex, Money’s awful gender experiment, sample size: David, why haven’t they just tried… talking to people? Hasbro lobbying Big Hormone pink and blue brains have a lot of overlap, news of mars water is like news of the first gay Disney character, we found a full britta filter on mars, the first water on mars theory, Herschel thought people lived in the sun, all the things we’ve sent to mars, the “““first””” evidence of water on mars, “““recent””” water on mars, saying we found water on mars makes it sound like we’re tackling the same problem over and over, we’re learning all kinds of stuff about mars, yes there’s water on mars but first let’s define water, gender neutral martians, “sublimate” makes Caroline happy, there is sometimes and maybe water on mars, there definitely used to be water on mars, martian time periods, stop personifying mars Caroline, “the planet Vulcan’; the astronomers still watching intently”, the precovery of Pluto 15 years before its discovery, the rock dove became the pigeon, pigeons were domesticated multiple times, pigeons may be the first domesticated bird, 350 breeds of domesticated pigeons, met gala pigeon looks, endurance pigeons flying for 22 hours, homing pigeon navigation, reddit quotes, the pigeon origins of Reuters, these are kinds of jokes you can support with your donation, listener submitted comeback, world war pigeons, 36 Dickin Medals went to pigeons, feral domestic pigeons, pigeons are better pets than parrots, stress egg laying, Darwin loved pigeons.
Sources:
Sex and Gender by Archer and Lloyd, 2002.
A Brief History of ‘Gender’
Nature or Nurture: The Case of the Boy Who Became a Girl
PEW: On Gender Differences, No Consensus on Nature vs. Nurture
2008 Paper: The Nature and Nurture of Gender
1993 Paper: Physical attractiveness of boys with gender identity disorder
2019 Paper: Neurobiology of gender identity and sexual orientation
Cleveland Clinic: Androgens
2022 paper: Brain Sex in Transgender Women Is Shifted towards Gender Identity
2020 Paper: Brain Sex Differences Related to Gender Identity Development: Genes or Hormones?
2020 Paper: Neuroscience and Sex/Gender: Looking Back and Forward
PBS: Map of Gender Diverse Cultures
Article: Indigenous Tribes Embraced Gender Fluidity Prior to Colonisation
MIT: Gender Pay Gap
STEM Women: The Gender Pay Gap in STEM
---
Early Mars Ovservations and the Canals
William Herschel on Mars to the Royal Society
Basalla on Herschel's Sun People Theory
Lowell to Nature on Life on Mars
Lowell's Mars Canal Obsession
List of Mars Missions
Vox's Mars Water Article
Nasa 2015 Press Release
Nasa 2017 Walk Back Press Release
NYTimes 2015 Water on Mars
NYTimes 2018 Lake on Mars
Space.com 2022 Water could be Magma
"Recent" Water Found on Mars
Ask a Nasa Scientist "Is There Water on Mars"
Stability of the Liquid Water Phase on Mars
Nasa on Mars In Depth
Smithsonian Magazine Water on Mars
NYTimes Planet Vulcan Reporting 1876
The Precovery of Pluto
---
Wendall Levi: Pigeon Guy
Jacobin Pigeon
Pouter Pigeon
Squabs
Gilbert & Shapiro: Pigeon Domestication
Domestic Pigeons Paper
Why Pigeons, Not Parrots
Best Of Everything!
It's our first Best Of episode! We sat down to listen to and talk about the topics YOU told us were your favorites!
Temporal Illusions! Eurovision! Dodos, and so much more!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!
We also learn about:
The handsome Dr. Ella Hubber, if a friend recommended this to you they’re amazing and didn’t start that orphanage fire, declaring Tom’s love for Carly in the first episode, the first “Comedy”, Tom’s Eurovision indoctrination, the grim Holiday Episode, *aggressively podcasts at man*, seeing Tom’s wheels spinning, Let’s Go To Therapy Together!
41: Eyevolution, Eliminating Mosquitos, and Bagged Milk w/ Sabrina Cruz
What are some of the wildest ways that eyes have evolved? What would happen if we got rid of all mosquitos, and how would we even do it? And how on Earth did some Canadians come to love bagged milk?
Images we talk about:
The Picture Tom had on his Dorm Wall
The Sheep Video
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:05:15) Eyevolution
(00:44:03) Eliminating Mosquitos
(01:18:11) Bagged Milk
(01:41:18) Outro
We also learn about:
Ella you’ve made it! it’s bagged milk all the way down, organs of extreme perfection and complication, misquoting Darwin, this is cliche because this is where this came from, Darwin’s clickbait, Eyevolution 2 Eyelectric BoogEyeloo, eye diagrams on Tom’s dorm wall, octopi are aliens, we are the ones with backward photoreceptors, you’re perfect just the way you are, horizontal and vertical pupils, cats have built in sunglasses, taller animals have rounder pupils, using the blur gradient for depth perception most, birds have circular pupils, compensatory cyclovergence in goats, horror writers have rotating goat eyes, w shaped pupils in cuttlefish, heart shaped pupils, frog pupils are a mystery, “I ought to conquer the cold shudder”, it’s just 1 mosquito species or 3,000, mosquitos are on every continent, vegetarian mosquitos, blood drinking mosquitos only drink blood to reproduce, I thought we were capri suns, *joke about women here*, palette, no plant requires mosquito pollination, the mosquito fish, mosquitos are delectable… uh… for fish, does every entomologist eat bugs, dark clouds of arctic mosquitos, cleaning pools just lacks that wow factor, mosquitos annoy caribou to death, the ecosystem would hiccup and move on, the invisible hand of mosquitos, nearly half of all people ever to live have been killed by mosquito disease, extirpation, the classic sterile insect technique has been used since the 1950s, you are the third person I’ve known whose had to sex fruit flies, “Ella’s Virgins”, filling mosquitos with good bacteria, spider venom fungus to brutally kill mosquitos, why are you here Sabrina, casual Ella lore drop about living in Canada, milk with the skin on, you don’t raw dog the milk bag, a heavy cold hacky sack, metric system looking pretty sexy, the metrication of Canada, this new fancy bag milk technology, too much marketing brain, demetricating, DIY bag milk, Sabrina’s got big misc energy.
Sources:
The Origin of Species
Serb & Eernisse on Cephalopod Eyes
David Holmes on the "Weird Wiring" of our Eyes
Labin & Ribak One Theory Why Our Eyes are Wired Backwards
The Amazing Meta-Analysis of Pupil Shape from Banks et al.
NPR Interview of Eye Researchers
W Shaped Pupil of Cuttlefish
Pupil Diversity in Frogs
Darwin's Leter to Asa
---
Ecology: A world without Mosquitoes
What would happen if we eliminated the worlds mosquitoes
The different types of mosquitoes
Malaria Facts
Irradiated mosquitoes
GM Mosquitoes
World Mosquito Program
Mosquito Killing Fungus
---
CBC on Selling Milk in Bags
Metrication - A Guide for Consumers (1974)
Report on Canadian Metrication Progress
CBC on Canada's Bagged Milk History
40: Mitochondrial Eve, Climate Change CRISPR, and Telephone Music
Who is the most recent human we all share our DNA with? How can CRISPR be used to help the climate crisis? And what do telephones have to do with music?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:22) Mitochondrial Eve
(00:39:21) Climate Change CRISPR
(01:14:15) Telephone Music
(01:47:15) Outro
Images we talk about:
We also learn about: Dartboard topics, Most recent common female ancestor, that’s actually the topic! endosymbiotically engulfing mitochondria, every animal now has this little friend, a fly gets caught in a photocopier and now we can’t live without it, mitochondrial DNA is only passed down the female line, mitochondrial DNA mutates once every 8,000 years, mitochondrial eve may have existed 150,000 years ago, eve wasn’t alone but she was our common ancestor, the eve of sperm whales was only 10,000 years ago, for squids it was 35,000 years, “won’t somebody think of the men”, Y Chromosomal Adam may have come from 210,000 years ago, concestor, simulating the concestor in a simulation, it’s not really a family tree it’s a messy web that we can draw a triangle around, GMOs vs Gene Editing, cool rad interspersed short palindromic repeats, tell them about how repairs happen! just some extracurricular learning, tom guesses cow farts in one, fartless cows without editing the cows themselves, we could eat less meet or just genome edit our way out of this, blue ribbon cow fart judge, is this a bandaid? making plants work harder to absorb CO2, photosynthesis labor laws, it’s not just “eat more carbon” it’s also grow deeper roots, “adapting the world to suit our misuse, rather than trying to improve our own behavior”, who needs pesticides when you have ugly plants, the scientific community is carefully thinking about these things, head phones, switchboard operators, that’s so gool, tom puts the podcast on hold, the devil invented hold music, hold music and temporal perception. no music makes time slow down, the fans of hold music, Tim Carleton’s stereo mistake “yeah… sorry about that”, the vocal encoder, mmm whatcha say, “it is the identity of our artistic project”, Ella’s Sherlock ringtone, Dark Blue, a book about making ringtones, 346 certified gold ringtones, Beyonce is the ringtone queen, ringtone podcasts, can only hope we’re causing as many people bodily harm as possible
Sources:
No, a Mitochondrial “Eve” Is Not the First Female in a Species
Origin of Mitochondria
Biologos: Mitochondrial Eve and Y Chromosome Adam
Mitochondrial DNA and human evolution
All About Mitochondrial Eve: An Interview with Rebecca Cann
Molecular Clock
Haplogroups
Giant Squid Mitochondrial Eve
Sequencing Y Chromosomes Resolves Discrepancy in Time to Common Ancestor of Males Versus Females
The 'extremely ancient' chromosome
Most Recent common ancestor
---
National Human Genome Research Institue: What is genome editing?
GOV.UK: Plans to unlock power of gene editing unveiled
Nature: History of Agricultural Biotechnology: How Crop Development has Evolved
Synthego: History of Genetic Engineering and the Rise of Genome Editing Tools
BROAD Institute: Questions and Answers about CRISPR
2021 Paper: Application of Gene Editing for Climate Change in Agriculture
Innovature: Gene Editing Is A Key To Environmental Sustainability
2021 Paper: EU policy must change to reflect the potential of gene editing for addressing climate change
2019 Paper: Application of genetic modification and genome editing for developing climate-smart banana
UC Davis: Can CRISPR Cut Methane Emissions From Cow Guts?
Article: Biotech company claims genetic selection can cut methane emissions in cattle
2017 Paper: Is Editing the Genome for Climate Change Adaptation Ethically Justifiable?
Cut and Paste - Francis Crick Institude
---
Headphone History from Smithsonian Mag
Hold Music Technicalities from NPR
The Influence of Music on Temporal Perceptions in an on-hold Waiting Situation
This American Life Hold Music Episode
Tim Carleton's Opus No 1 from The Atlantic
Opus No 1 in Mono and Carleton's Comment
Vocal Encoder Patent
Logic Manual on Vocoder History
Daft Punk Vocoder Interview
Book on Ring Tones
CNN Ring Tone Interviews from 2006
RIAA Gold & Platinum Ringtones
CNN on Phone Music
Tom-nical Difficulties: Back in a Week! (And the week after that!)
Tom threw out his voice screaming about the new Zelda game (not actually) so we're delaying the next episode. But! We're not shifting the release schedule so the next episode will still come out the Thursday after!
In the meantime, check out the episode of Veritasium that Tom researched and wrote!
39: The Pill, The 2 Highest Points on Earth, and Period Products
What are the myths and facts around the hormonal birth control pill? Why are there two highest points on Earth, and does that teach us about our planet? And what are all the ways period products affect the world we live in?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:04) The Pill
(00:52:01) The 2 Highest Points on Earth
(01:28:28) Period Products
(01:49:10) Outro
We also learn about: Now that’s a rabbithole I can go down, taking half the pill makes you bi, LLE now played in health classes across the nation, the Ebers papyrus, they weren’t just using contraception they were communicating it, ancient Egyptian RAs, can’t get pregnant when you’re dead from mercury poisoning, the witch bull, bundling is the x games of abstinence, Tom definitely knows how the pill works, it’s not that men don’t know about women’s health it’s that women have to know about men’s health too, 1827 we discover the egg, 1843 confirmed conception happens when sperm enters the egg, the worlds fair of contraception, the American Birth Control League, Ella has a revelation, if I were a contraception and you took me I’d be an oral contraception, the original pill was 66x stronger to try to prove it was effective, bogus bad faith birth control studies, don’t well me, the Earth is squished because it spins, Team Everest vs Team Chimborazo, what the fuck is sea level, NERD I KNOW YOU’RE DOING MATH, nonbinary sex ed is just learning about mountains, 8,000 meters above Church, the air-sea interface, the metonic cycle of 19 years, carrying sea level, that’s what Tom gets for planning a joke, the geoid, a slide from Everest to Chimborazo, the death zone, our third ancient Egypt reference, Hypatia throws a pad, i got you a 100 rock that’s what you need right? the black hole of period history, you can’t abstinence periods, if you’ve used a sanitary belt join the discord! using WWII bandages, menstrual products vs the environment, the menstrual cup recommended by 3/3 members of the podcast, period poverty, the pink tax and the tampon tax, menstrual contact “turns new wine sour” “hives of bees die”, the stigma and cost of menstrual products, efforts to reduce period poverty, sniping review corner.
Sources:
Paper: The history of contraception: From ancient egyptians to the "morning after"
NYT: In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel For Family Planning
NHS: Sex and contraception after birth
The Bull of Innocent VIII
Mercury Policy MIT: History Of Mercury Use in Products and Processes
Book: Encyclopedia of Motherhood, Volume 1
Paper: Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South
UN: Contraceptive Use by Method
PBS: The Timeline of the Pill
Vox: Where The Pill is Free
Planned Parenthood: History of the Pill
Paper: Return to fertility following discontinuation of oral contraceptives
Paper: “They Destroy the Reproductive System”: Exploring the Belief that Modern Contraceptive Use Causes Infertility
The Guardian: Contraceptive Pill 'Can Lead Women to Choose Wrong Partner'
Paper: MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives
Paper: The impact of combined oral contraceptives on ocular tissues: a review of ocular effects
Paper: Oral contraceptive use in women changes preferences for male facial masculinity and is associated with partner facial masculinity
Paper: Relationship Satisfaction and Outcome in Women Who Meet Their Partner While Using Oral Contraception
---
NOAA on the Tallest Mountain
Nat Geo on Sea Level
Britannica Definition of Sea Level
Bradshaw's History of English Levelling
NOAA on the Metonic Cycle
Vox on the GeoPolitics of Surveying
NOAA's New Datum for 2025
GIS Geography on the Geoid
ESRI on the Geoid
Everest's Death Zone
Scientific American on the Geoid
Ciro Pabon on the Practicality of Sea Level
---
Menstruation Products in the Science Museum
History of The Tampon
The Evolution of Menstrual Products
Enviromenstrual Fact Sheet
Which Period Products Are Best for the Environment?
The Tampon Tax: Everything You Need to Know
Tampon Tax Abolished
Action Aid: Period Poverty
38: Ellen Weatherford, Can Fish Drown, and Real Pokemon
Special guest Ellen Weatherford joins us to ask: just how interesting can water and fish be? And are there any pokemon inspired by strange but real animals?
Check out Ellen's podcasts "Just the Zoo of Us" and "Spellbound and Gagged"
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: defining fish, “just be cool about it”, defining drowning, Ellen and Caroline teach Tom and Ella about where water oxygen comes from, history of breathing, where we’re going we don’t need bones, christmas tree worm, osmoregulation and ion gradients i love it and i wish i understood it better, keeping a salt backpack, gills and lungs, “sorry for the crisis”, I’ve been sleeping on fish, mmmmm actually gonna evolve back to the water, can I get a return on these lungs? but what we’re talking about is drowning. cold water more oxygen, arapaima, ding ding ding drowning yay! thousand mile dead zones, only some sharks need to move to breathe, Ram Ventilation vs Buccal Pumping at Coachella, buccal vs buckle, asmr buccal pumping, tuna need to swim or drown, letting arapaima rest in your arms, learning to love fish, Spiders and Commitment, alligators vs manatees, singing a B flat for gators, alligator snapping turtle, bringing Ellen to party, Wooper and Clodsire, the iberian ribbed newt, obliterating your future husband with a Whimsicott.
Sources:
WHO Definition of Drowning
Origin of Gills
2022 Gill Ion Regulation Paper
Evolution of Lungs
Lung Conversion to Swim Bladders
How Fish Deal with Salinity
Salmon Osmoregulation
Bullshark Osmoregulation
Cold Water Holds more Oxygen
Hypoxia Adaptations in the Amazon Rainforest
Air Breathing Arapaima
Gill Remodeling
Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
Hypoxia Task Force
Tuna Ram Ventilation
37: Loving Toxicity, Future Warnings, and Better Burials
Is there more to learn than to fear from toxic animals? How would we warn future humans about present dangers? And what are better ways for us to be buried?
Things we mention:
WIPP Mock Up Images
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
This ant can kill 1 million elephants, haven’t found a venomous mushroom… yet, a lot of my friends are toxic frogs, nom nom nom I eat poison, don’t touch shit, from none to death, the schmidt sting index, I want the data not the sting, what schmidts data was actually saying, some toxins don’t correlate with pain or lethality, venomous mammals are have in common that they’re disregarded, shrews beareth a cruel mind, arguably venomous slow lorises, expanding our definition of toxicity, letting tom load a joke, protecting the future from caroline’s savage burns, the waste isolation pilot plant, 573 known extinct languages, I can haz nuclear waste? skull and crossbones, cubed morphines, “this place is a message…this place is not a place of honor”, landscape of thorns, forboding blocks, it’s giving kiki, taking a photo on a spike for the gram, nucelar priesthood, ray cats, “they didnt really care what we said i think”, understanding our past to connect to our future, just leave a dvd of the mummy, we’ve been burying people for 120,000 years, inventing oven crypts in the 1800s, gotta workshop the name oven crypt, “I want to be in a big bone pit”, lots of places resuse plots, just walking past a pile of tombstones! blasting our relatives into the stratosphere, natural burials, fungus coffins, water cremation.
Sources:
Poison, Venom, Toxungens
Atlas Obscura Schmidt Sting Index
NPR Justin Schmidt Interview
First Sting Index Paper: Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms
Evolution of Stings and Sociality
NYTimes Interview with Schmidt
Venomous Mammals: A Review
Nekaris Paper on Loris Bites Between Each Other
Loris Venom for Communication
Loris Venom for Cobra Mimicry
Shrew Spit Tames Cancer Cells
Justin Schmidt Obituary
---
The US Energy Department Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
EPA What is Transuranic Radioactive Waste?
Understanding Extinct Languages: When and Why They Die Off
Jolly Roger
Pirates, Poison, and Professors: A Look at the Skull and Crossbones Symbol
Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Summary of WIPP Team A report with images
Vice: How to Warn the Future About Toxic Waste
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository
Nevada Attorney General: The Fight Against Yucca Mountain
The Ray Cat Solution
---
BBC: Death Rituals in the Animal Kingdom
BBC: What Happens When We Run Out of Space to Bury the Dead
BBC: The World is Running Out of Burial Space
A Thought Experiment by J. Harrington
Forbes: Rising to Heaven
Dawn: South Africa's Graveyard Generation Mourns
IOL: What About the Ancestors
Paper: The environmental pollution caused by cemeteries and cremations: A review
EA: The Grave Issue of Pollution From Cemeteries
Sending Your Ashes to Spaces
Smithsonian: What is Water Cremation
Ask A Mortician
Ask A Mortician: Water Cremation
Ask A Mortician: Green Burial Options
Technical Difficulties: Back Next Week!
Apologies all, Ella's computer kicked the bucket, so we'll be back next week with a fresh episode!
36: Scientific Language Models, The Smell of Space, and Forgotten Olympic Events
See our Game Night Livestream Monday March 27th at 5pm EST!
Get cool drive rewards and listen to our special bonus episode!
Can Large Language Models be used for good in scientific fields? Could space smell... good? And what olympic events have we tried, abandoned, and completely forgotten about?
Things we mention:
Compulsory Figures
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!
We also learn about:
Using ChatGPT to break up with your partner, it’s all very dry, you have to know the knowledge going in, LLMs are tools not databases, ChatGPT as a co-author, authorship carries accountability, Galactica was only public for 3 days, you can’t use galactica anymore happy??? racist protien AI, Protien and Chemistry Language Models are amazing, transparency with AI, the Bloom Project, ChatGPT emotionally ends the episode early, be funnier, in space no one can smell you smell, Venus smells like eggs, Tom volunteers to smell space, how smell works, don’t breathe if you’re driving, olfactory epithelium, 40 million olfactory neurons. a 40 million piece slimy jigsaw in my nose, asmr smells, 1 atom per cubic centimeter in space, Tim Peake’s answer, the smell of static, getting a refund for Tim’s answer, making ozone in space, sexy dying stars, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon, your grill makes star smell, raspberries at the center of our universe, a number so big it makes you laugh, the IRAM telescope, one of the largest interstellar molecules, I’ll show you Tim Peake! I was looking for amino acids but now I know what the black hole cloud might smell like, combining all the smells into a cocktail, who knows what the rest of space smells like! No, I’m going to fight you Caroline, Koribos wins the entire Olympics, the rise in wells, ancient pump up music, armor racing a car with 4 minds of its own, the 5 month long Olympics, putting the figure in figure skating, dueling flash mob, the wonder of demonstration sports, goal ball, Olympic tiktoking, hurting Caroline and Ella with the art Olympics, write fanfiction for us, at least they had standards to not give medals, that’s my dad on a bike! trying can be more poetic than poetry.
Sources:
How ChatGPT works
What ChatGPT and Generative AI Mean for Science – Nature
Nature Biomedical Engineering Paper
ChatGPT: Five Prioroties for Research – Nature
Specialised LLMs – Toward Data Science
Galactica Only Survived Three Days
Med-BERT
NVIDIA Blog on Biology LLMs
Bloom: the Open LLM
---
TedEd: How Does Smell Work?
Tim Peak- What Space Smells Like
Australian Academy of Science
Increased complexity in Interstellar Chemistry 2009
NASA: Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Space: Comet 67P
Smithsonian: Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Scientific America: Four Great Scents From Outer Space
---
Hippias' History of Olympics
Hugh Lee's Paper on the First Recorded Olympics
MET: Ancient Olympics
IOC: Chariot Racing
Official Record of Early Olympics Games
LA Times: Compulsory Figures
Skating Scene: Compulsory Figures
WSJ: Compulsory Figures
Ellyn Kestnbaum's Culture on Ice
Royal Armories: Dueling at the Olympics
Gliding at he Olympics
IOC: Horse Skijoring
Goalball Origins
Smithsonian Mag: Art at the Olym
O Sport Poem
Recast: Just The Zoo Of Us: Rats w/ Let's Learn Everything!
Today we're rebroadcasting our appearance on Just the Zoo of Us as we prepare for an episode coming NEXT week for the MaxFunDrive! On this episode we combine our shows formats to bring you a full Topic, Question, and misc, all about one of the most misunderstood, intelligent, and rascally animals: the rat!
Join Tom at a MaxFunDrive Meetup!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!
35: Don't DeExtinct the Dodo, Humans vs Computers, and Art Forgery
Is it really possible to bring back the Dodo, and what even really happened in the first place? Are there any games left that humans can beat computers at, and why might that be okay? And what can art forgery tell us about art and the art world?
Images/Videos we Mention:
The TinkerToy Tic Tac Toe Computer
The Rock Paper Scissors Robot
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!
We also learn about:
The Cherished Dodo, tinction, what does a dodo taste i mean look like, dodo art telephone, only 1 full skeleton, actualy lots of things die this way, invasive species also killed the dodo, Alice in Wonderland’s trendsetting the Dodo, Caroline’s clearly a Dodo person, Dodo DNA, Jurassic Park was a Documentary, I hope to die in a funny way, bringing the Bucardo back, the first De-extinction, and the first Double Extinction, DNA vaults, the nicobar pigeon, Cloacas are “Fun” according to Ella, let’s reintroduce the Dodos too why not, “bring a little bit of magic back to the mauritious”, ancient egyptian tic tac toe, the Shannon Number, The Mechanical Turk, TuroChamp, Chess was the Drosophila of AI, bad AI predictions, Deep Blue vs Kasparov, The Googolplex of Go games, Dr Fill the Crowssword AI, 100% Rock Papers Scissor Win Rate, Poker AI, this really cool game called Superluminauts, what’s “unfair” in AI? the power of art comes from yourself, the art of forgery, Han van Meegeren, Dodo in Gearl with a Pearl Earring we all make the same dumb joke, new Vermeer, don’t arrest me it’s just a forgery, there could still be Elmyr de Hory forgeries, F is for Fake, “if my work hangs in a museum long enough, it becomes real”, Tom makes a totally normal and not embaressing mixup of Van Gogh and DaVinci, how to spot a forgery, carbon dating forgeries, just look at it closely, identifying craquelure, mass spectrometry, so much of this is just about money, Salvator Mundi Ship of Theseus, were these reviews forged? Go check! the laughing people
Sources:
Sources:
NHM: Dodo De-Extinction Announcement Causes Debate
NatGeo: The Dodo is Dead! Long Live the Dodo
Smithsonian: Article on Colossal Biosciences
Colossal Biosciences: The Dodo
Nature: What Would it Take to Bring Back the Dodo
The Atlantic: Article on the Dodo
NatGeo: First Extinct Clone Created
MIT: The Plan to Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon
---
The TinkerToy Tic Tac Toe Computer
---
34: The Replication Crisis, Human Senses, and Pride Flags
Is psychology doomed, or could the reproducibility crisis a good thing? How many senses do we really have? And what's the history behind all the pride flags you see?
Check out:
Maintenance Phase's Episode on Brian Wansink's Downfall
Strange Aeons (on My Immortal Authors)
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!
We also learn about:
We’re already learning! god i hate the stanford prison experiment, the four horsemen of the reproducibility crisis, the file drawer effect, honestly this horseman sounds like capitalism, what if we stopped saying “statistically significant”, Brian Wansink’s food studies and The Grad Student Who Never Said “No”, Brian this is a joke right? P-hacking the topic itself, failure to replicate isn’t the end of the world, “I Read ALL 100 Replications”, differences between the social and biological sciences, D.A.R.E for science! pre-registering a meta-analysis on pre-registration, the many good horses that work against the apocalypse, my eyes are named Dex and Sid, gustation, grilling my friends about guessing the 5 flavors, taste subclasses, touching our fingers together for half an hour, different receptors for light and hard touch, referred pain, feeling temperature in our bones, we have more cold receptors than heat, don’t test proprioception if you’re driving, it’s 10 o clock do you know where your limbs are?, the real sixth sense, losing proprioception, interoception, the holiday paradox, animal senses, ancient Egypt invented the rainbow flag, the RGB values of flags, Gilbert Baker, Harvey Milk “we needed something beautiful, something from us”, volunteers coming together to construct the first flag, oh they couldn’t just amazon a flag they had to make it, the pink is just impractical guys, the mile long flag, the Philadelphia Eagles Pride Flag, one flag to rule them all, lavender menaces, lesbian flag losing its lips.
Sources:
Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science
Nature Survey on Reproducibility Crisis
The Four Horsemen of Irreproducibility
Vox on Replication Crisis
Wansink's Blog Post
The Cut on Wansink's Downfall
Arstechnica on Wansink
Spurious Correlations
Analysis of Wansink's Errors
Gelman & Loken on P-Hacking
Science Reaction to Psychology Replication Study
Open Science Foundation Data for 100 Replications
Science on Preregistration
Nature Analysis on Pre-registration
Science on Retraction Watch
Lessons from Retraction Watch
Retraction Watch's Earliest Retraction
Meta Analysis of the Retraction Penalty
Kurzgesagt Retractions
APA Teachable Moments from the Replication Crisis
---
Kokumi
Taste Buds
The Man Who Lost His Body
Thermoreceptors
Referred Pain
Why Does Time Seem to Speed Up with Age?
The Emerging Science of Interoception
Alexithymia
Hygroroception
The Weirdest Senses Animals Have That You Don't
---
Stradley Ronon: Evolution of the Pride Flag
Britannica: The Rainbow Flag
BBC Culture: History of the Rainbow Flag
Gilbert Baker's Website
The Harvey Milk Online Biography
Insersex Inclusive Pride Flag
Progress Pride Flag
NCYLGBTSites: Lavendar Menace
Biangles - Liz Nania
Biscuit: Bi Flag Histroy
Strange Æons: History of the Lesbian Flag
Heckin Unicorn: The Gay Man Flag
UONC: Other Pride Flags
33: Immortality, Before Trees, and Emojis 💩
Is immortality possible in humans or other animals? What was on Earth before trees? And what can we learn from emoji?🤔
Things we talk about:
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about:
Halloween in January, stories of immortality, the epic of gilgamesh, MR BEAST GRANTS IMMORTALITY IF YOU STAY UP FOR 6 DAYS, the first story of facing AND accepting mortality, teen alexander the immortal, shooting down 9 suns, making your own immortality serum, spoiler alert we don’t find immortality in this topic, the first blood transfusion, oh nevermind not really, testicle rejuvination solves all problems, how do we die? programmed death and antagonistic pliotropy, accumulating insurmountable damage, the Hayflick Limit, shoe telomeres, four nobel laureates behind atlos labs (aaaand also jeff bezos), we’ve never recorded a naked mole rat dying from old age, transdifferentiation in the immortal jellyfish, surprise immortality! the slow and old greenland shark, having to go through puberty and pay taxes is not worth immortality, “I sort of like that the animals are winning, and we haven’t quite got there yet”, you’d make a great tree, Caroline makes us define a tree, trees are “a human concept based on visual criteria”, NOTHING EXISTS, trees put oxygen in the atmosph- wait no that was algae, Caroline wants our bewilderment and fear in the questions, the Cambrian explosion, fossils of a tree fight, sharks are older than trees, what are these spires of life, cockroach t-rex, it really is the second Halloween episode, lovecraftian Earth, letters are pictures, emojis are language, our most used emojis, emoticons, codepoints, the first emoji, standarized emoji, no more flag emojis, people assume the internet keeps records of itself.
Sources:
Royal Forestry Society Tree Definition
Encyclopedia Britannica Tree Definition
Natrual History Museum First Trees
World's First Tree Reconstructed
Giant cladoxylopsid trees resolve the enigma of the Earth’s earliest forest stumps at Gilboa, Stein et al, 2007 (Paper)
Timeline: The evolution of life
Smithsonian Magazine: The Top 10 Greatest Survivors of Evolution
Live Science: Prehistoric Mystery Organism a Humongous Fungus
Rotted wood–alga–fungus: the history and life of Prototaxites Dawson, Hueber 2001 (Paper)
Smithsonian Magazine: Giant Mushrooms
---
Nineveh
The Eternal Life of Gilgamesh
The Search for Immortality
History of the First Blood Transfusion
Serge Voronoff
The Long and Gruesome Hstory of People Trying to Live Forever
Theories of Ageing
What Is Antagonistic Pleiotropy?
Evolution and the Biology of Aging
DNA damage—how and why we age?
Hayflick limit
Telomeres
2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Naked Mole Rats
Greenland Sharks
Immortal Jellyfish
---
Unicode Emoji Stats
Lauren Schwartzberg's The Oral History of the Poop Emoji
Swiftkey Regional Emoji Data
Emojipedia Stats
Early Emoticons
Unicode's Emoji Principles
Unicode's Stance on New Flag Emojis
Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set
32: The Ozone Success Story, Turning Heads, and Eurovision
What's the story of how we successfully saved the ozone? Why and how can owls turn their heads around, and who else can? And can Ella convert Tom to the wonder that is Eurovision?
Listen to Ella's Full Eurovision Playlist
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: defining ozone, not wrong but not right, the ozone layer is miles thick and not full of ozone, the sun is a deadly laser, tom feels stupid about the ozone, accidentally finding out about the ozone layer depleting, the dobson ozone spectrophotometer, “being an ignorant physicist”, this is why we monitor things, we need more metaphors actually, CFCs and HCFCs, the impact of humans on the planet, WARNING: MAY CAUSE DEATH FOR ALL FUTURE HUMANS, wait legal proceedings were slow??? supersonic flights between france and the UK only, you’re doing colonialism on US ACTUALLY, 198 parties ratified the Montreal Protocol, early action is important, why don’t we talk about this enough!!! thank your local environmental researcher today, owl 360 no scope, side-eyed Tom, pigeon slander, side and front facing, owls don’t have eyeballs, cone of death, I love it when there’s a but, the guiness book of world records is dumb, breaking the rule of 7, why hang upside down, the first Eurovision was formal, no english songs allowed, the big 5, bicameral voting, Britain’s losing streak, “nobody hates the british entry more than the british”, international politics and Eurovision, it’s like We Didn’t Start the Fire, “what else would we sing about”, it’s always been political, Ella’s favorite entries, Abba surprises Tom, how eurovision changes with the times, from ballrooms to tiktok, our future plugs.
Sources:
National Geographic: Ozone Layer
EPA: Basic Ozone Layer Science
UNEP: Ozone and You
J. C. Farman, B. G. Gardiner & J. D. Shanklin, 1985 (Paper)
The Evolution of Policy Responses to Stratospheric Ozone Depletion (1989 Paper)
The Impact of High Altitude Aircraft on the Ozone Layer in the Stratosphere (1994 Paper)
Impacts of a Near-Future Supersonic Aircraft fleet on atmospheric composition and climate (2022 Paper)
The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer
The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer
UN - The Climate Crisis
---
Krings et al Owl Neck Rotation & Anatomy
McGill on Owl Eyeballs
Owl Eye Mobility
Human Eye Mobility
Kok-Mercado & Gailloud Poster on Blood Flow Adaptations
NatGeo on Owl Head Turns
Guiness World Record for Mammal Head Rotation
Buchholtz & Stepien Sloth Spine Paper
Sloth Conservation Foundation on Why Sloths Hang
Study on Sloth Muscles
Becky Cliffe on Sloth Evolution
---
Ella's Excellent Eurovision Playlist
The Weird and Wonderful Hisotry of the Eurovision Song Contest
More History
An Actual Academic Paper On Eurovision Voting
Toward Data Science: Eurovision Voting Blocs
Armenia–Azerbaijan Relations in the Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision During the Bosnian War
Carnation Revolution
31: End of Year Q&A 2022
To round out the year we learn about the most interesting thing: each other! We talk about the process of researching and writing an episode, future sciences and science fiction, and laugh and cry reflecting on our favorite things from 2022.
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: our favorite topics, this is why we don’t do topics on colors, topic lists, science ruining movies, science is just a job, anything goes as long as you don’t explain it to me, hacking the mainframe, the one flaw in the big bang theory, how do we research and when is it done? asking yourself questions, researching vs writing, research wormholes and topic duds, Caroline’s natural defense colors, London and NYC recommendations, religion and science, dealing with burnout, defeating Ella in battle, how we record, our Hollywood writers room, start a podcast if only to try, MUNA and Stromae and AJR, our favorite things this year, Everything Everywhere and Elf, Fortnite and Pokemon, Our Flag Means Death and Succession and Fleabag and Craig of the Creek and Dragula, Yotsuba, Two Headed Calf, making ourselves cry, Scoob & Shag, pandan and coke zero, our favorite pokemon, I am displeased with your lack of brevity, how each of us takes over the world, our personal take and our interest is more important than topic overlap, futue sciences, the birth of a topic, projected to finish everything soon so we can stop talking to each other, asmr speedrunning, today's topic is this pad of sticky notes, our podcast spotify wrapped, what we’re looking forward to (Breath of the Wild 2), really dumb content.
30: The HaLearnDay Spectacular! 2022
On a very special holiday episode, Tom, Caroline, and Ella give the gift of learning! We've wrapped up our favorite fun facts to give to each other, and even gotten a few presents from some special guests!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: the the gin craze, no free gin advertisements, gin street and beer street, wrapping paper foley work, pumpkin toadlet balance, silly UK laws, yeah and maybebeallowedtoshootacrossbowatacathedral, keep your kite flying private, kite footloose, beached whales for the queen, suspicious salmon makes sense, honey tummys, more grenades on mars by 2025, dinosaur time breaks caroline’s brain, hey these brussels sprouts aren’t bad now, brussels sprouts hipsters, Britain’s dedicated tv popularity analyst, tom regifts a fun fact, and now I’m thinking about animal genitals, Cotesia and Drosophala: like a good cheese and a fine wine.
Vine Pair: The Gin Craze
History: The Gin Craze
William Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane
Smithsonian Magazine: Pumpkin Toadlet
Semicircular canal size constrains vestibular function in miniaturized frogs
Insect Orientation: Stay on Course with the Sun
NIH: Vestibular System
Wright Brothers Flight
Odd laws you may unknowingly break
Legislation.org: Salmon Act 1986
Bee Bubbling
Human Objects on Mars
Why it's Hard to Land on Mars
Perseverance's 10 Million Names
Phoenix Lander Mini DVD
Wright Flyer Cloth on Mars
Tyrannosaurus Rex
Stegosaurus
The Brussel Sprouts Renaissance
TV Pickup
TV Pickup Quotes
The Length of a Short Sperm
29: What's in a Scientific Name, How Many Cells are in a Human, and What the British Museum Stole
What is the science of scientific naming, and could it actually be life saving? How many cells are in a human body, and why is it important to know? And how exactly did the British Museum... "acquire" all these artifacts?
Watch Tom's PowerPoint Comedy Show!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: what does tom smell like? naming is hard for computer science, naming is a science, reading 12 million paper titles by hand, single use acronyms, polynomial naming, Ranunculus mother of dragons, the dino hip mixup, smooth transitions, the fermium wars, we all know what happened to element 102, berkelium californium americium, should we name elements after living people, Ella is the only true Swiftie, half of all exoplanets are named Kepler, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now, why? she’s a millipede, Ella will get an answer, humans have 1 cell technically, c elegans has exactly 1031 cells, don’t embarrass yourself by saying how many cells are in a mouse, we enter the wheels and doors debate, Ella sperm fact rick rolls us, the number of kinds of cells, tom is bad at math, every time a scientist questions a number an angel gets its wings, Livers Georg, Ella is heartbroken we don’t have a number, what’s the point of counting cells? the British Museum keeps 99% of things in the disney vault, offering a replica of the rosetta stone instead, Britain legally cannot return items without government approval, all the stuff we never knew about Moai statues, what does queen Victoria need with a Moai statue, her majesty declares finders keepers, actualy these stolen things mean as much to Britain now, most Britains want the items returned, there is so much to learn from this!
Sources:
Judith Winston's Review of Binomial Nomenclature
The Growth of Acronyms in the Scientific Literature
The Long and Short of Abbreviations (UA Medical Acronym)
Dinosaur Hip Naming Mixup
How Many Named Species are Valid?
Review of the Transfermium Wars
IUPAC 1994 Naming Decision
Naming Exoplanets
A Flu by Any Other Name
Nature on WHO Naming
Taylor Swift's Millipede
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Number of Bacteria In Your Body
Sperm
Types Of Cells In The Human Body
An Estimation Of The Number Of Cells In The Human Body
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Human Remains in the British Museum
British Museum: Rosetta Stone
British Museum: Moai of rapa Nui (Easter Island Statues)
CNN: British Museum Discusses fate of Easter Island Statues
British Museum: Benin Bronzes
The Guardian: British museum ‘Has Head in sand’ Over Return of Artefacts
British Museum: The Parthenon Sculptures
British Museum: Maqdala Collection
YouGuv: Should Britain Return Historical Artefacts to Their Country of Origin?
Culture war: the case against repatriating museum artifacts
NYT: Investigators, Citing Looting, Have Seized 27 Antiques From the Met
CNN: Manhattan DA returns 58 antiquities to Italy, including 21 seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
28: Cerebral Organoids, Are Cats Liquids, and The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
How can you study a brain without a brain? In what ways is a cat actually like a liquid? And why do we say The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread?
Images we Discuss:
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Watch the SciShow Episode Ella Wrote!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: brains are complex and hard to access, organoids, organettes, organittos, induced pluripotent stem cells are cool, Madeline Lancaster, DNA is amazing, scientific serendipity, try to make a brain and accidentally make a heart, human neurons in rat brains, ethical concerns, that does not make Caroline feel better, brain-on-a-chip, dish brain, great words, Pong, sentience, liquid cats, solid cats, gas cats, Slime, Ig Nobel, first make you laugh then make you think, atoms, God made cats a solid so you can pet them, mountains flow, Ella does not, the joy of the surface, scientists communicating science well, bread was invented in 1954, bread archaeology, cooking is a kind of fossilization, archaeobotanist, that’s what it means to specialize in bread, throwing it all into the bread business, SLICED BREAD IS MADE HERE, sound, sensible, and a progressive refinement, bread innovation, twin style bread, Caroline is not a world leader in bread innovation, a delicious stick of butter, idioms, a manifestation of the peculiar, irreversible binomial, to sell something for a song, don’t shit in the blue cupboard, the burnt bread crumbs of language.
Sources:
First Brain Organoids Paper
Stem Cells @ Lunch Digested Podcast
The Use of Brain Organoids
First Electrically Active Brain Organoids
Human Neurons Transplanted Into Rat Brain Study
Human Neuron in Rat Brain Image
Brain-On-A-Chip Review
Neurons Play Pong
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On the Rheology of Cats
Ted Talk on the Rheology of Cats
PBS: Are Cats Liquid?
Crustal Melting and the Flow of Mountains
A Hydrodynamic Approach To Cancer
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NPR on 14,000 Year Old Bread
Paper on Analyzing the Oldest Bread
Arranz-Otaegui's Presentation on the Prehistory of Bread
Invention of Sliced Bread
First Sliced Bread Ad
Sliced Bread Ads
Thick & Thin Bread
Dated Bread
Twin Style Bread
Fowler's Modern English Usage
Saeed's Semantics
Polish Idiom Translation
27: Zoologist Ash Campbell, Kleptoparasitism, and Australia's Best Animal
Today our guest Ashlen Campbell asks us: how do you stop a seagull from stealing your chips? And what can that teach us about the wild world of kleptoparasitism?
Our Favorite Ash Videos: Erythrism, Blathers Exposed
Ash's Follow Recommendations: @luccasbiohub @drkyliesoanes @zoe_kean_sci @sarawebbscience @astrokirsten
Support us with a Maximum Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Majored in zoology minored in chips, temperature effects on fish, dam spreadsheets, mosquitos don’t like skrillex, bee gom jabbar test, the beach scene, Miriam Rothschild & Theresa Clay coined Kleptoparasitism, bullying birds to throw up, not having a chip and getting hit by Ash’s ford fiesta, peacrabs have to steal to survive, messy definitions are interesting, stealing from siblings isn’t kleptoparasitism, neon cuckoo bees steal candies from babies, snails grabbing food from your throat, fossils caught stealing, mother feed me, taking care of other fishes babies, “he’s such a good father”, sneak spawning, The Real House Nest Husbands of Chesapeake Bay, swat raiding bees, kleptothermy, the answer is a seagull economy, kleptoplasty is eating batteries, floral larsony, hyenas change their sleep schedules to avoid thieving lions, green goblin otter hostage situations, eat worse chips, weighing the complexities of stealing, studying chip stealing, only you can stare at seagulls, the adorable and horny antechinus, “nothing here is okay”, nitpicking jurassic park, am I misrepresnting data? at least I have rainbow fish in animal crossing. being wrong on the internet, erudoot.
Sources:
Fleas, flukes, & cuckoos; a study of bird parasites
Iyengar’s Kleptoparasitism Review
Kleptobiosis
Pea crab (Pinnotherida)
Neon cuckoo bee (Thyreus nitidulus)
Wentletrap (Epitonium clathratulum)
Brachiopod fossils
Barn Owl Nest Switching
Three Spined Stickleback
Lestrimelitta Niitkib (toxin producing bee)
Fork-tailed drongo
Garter snake (2001)
Garter snake (2012)
Kleptopredation
Photosynthetic Sea Slug
Toxomerus Larva Stealing from Sundew
Floral Larceny
Plant Stealing Pollinators from Other Plants
Lions and Hyenas, Change in Activity Patterns
Cougar/ Black Bear Compensation
Gulls and plovers
Gull gaze
26: Pain, Vampiric Animals, and Penny Dreadfuls
How do we define pain, and what animals can feel it? How similar are vampires to real vampiric animals? And what are penny dreadfuls and how were they actually... good?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: pain is bad, but pain is good, what animals can feel pain, if they can feel kink pleasure from pain they can feel pain, it’s time to define pain for you guys, ella swoops in on a Tom joke, pain is like art, the international association for the study of pain, a funny example of pain, nuance baby! the 2 nail people is a great couples halloween costume, Descartes' pain theory started off so well, nociceptors, how do you test pain? injured flies, are we JigSaw? injecting bee venom into fish, ASC change fish pain laws, vampires are found in almost every culture, we need to protect the ice caps or the vampires will get out, hematophagy and sanguivores, vampire bugs and fish and birds, the fake vampire squid that eats poop, monogamous but false vampire bats, vampire bats are more beautiful and there’s a reason why, super speed super climbing and super stealth bats, blood heat vision with pit organs, biting with incisors not canines, blood is a thin gruel, vampirism is a radical dietary lifestyle, bats help each other out, barfing blood for friends, Twilight has the most scientifically accurate vampires, Ella bamboozles us, as literacy booms so does the need for cheap exciting stories, Varney came before Dracula and invented the tropes, The String of Pearls: a Romance (allegedly) and the origin of Sweeney Todd, tag yourself I’m women with daggers, 45% of victorian britain was under 20, children reading books to each other, the literature of rascaldom, half-penny dreadfullers, how many books were actually popular at their time, our horror recommendations, Junji Ito.
Sources:
The Nature and Science of Pain - Pain Australia
A Biological Substrate for Somatoform Disorders
Are We Wrong to Assume Fish Can’t Feel Pain - The Guardian
Animals Can Feel Pain A Biologist Explains Why - Vox
A History of Pain Research
History of Pain: A Brief Overview of the 17th and 18th Century
Pain Principles - Neuroscience Online
Can Ants Feel Pain?
Fish Do Not Feel Pain and its Implications for Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness, 2015
Insects Can Experience Chronic Pain - Smithsonian Magazine
Invertebrate Nociception, 2017
Do Fish Feel Pain? A Matter of Scientific Debate (Dr Sneddon Quote)
Farmed Fish Feel Pain, Stress and Anxiety - The Guardian
Why Fish Do Not Feel Pain (Key, 2016)
Anthropomorphic Denial of Fish Pain (Sneddon and Leah, 2016)
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Vampirism Lore
Hematophagy in Insects
Vampire Squid
NYTimes on Vampire Bats
Field Idenfitication Guide for Bats
The 3 Vampire Bat Abilities & Biting Habits
Heat Sensing in Bats
How Vampire Bats Bite
Comparative Study of Bat Incisors
Vampirism as a Radical Dietary Lifestyle
Food Sharing in Vampire Bats
Food Sharing Reciprocation Study
Food Sharing after Grooming Study
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Varney the Vampyre
The String of Pearls
Leaves from a Prison Diary
Disseminating Impure Literature': The 'Penny Dreadful' Publishing Business Since 1860
How Gruesome Penny Dreadfuls Got Victorian Children Reading
British Library on Penny Dreadfuls
Guardian on Penny Dreadfuls
Victorian Children's Periodicals: Penny Dreadfuls
25: 🎂 The Timeline of Timekeeping, Origins of Speech, and the Birthday of Birthdays
It's the show's birthday! And we're going to celebrate with LEARNING! How much do we really know about the history of keeping time? When did human speech first arise, and how would we even figure that out? And when did the concept of birthdays have its birthday?
We also learn about: Your favorite podcast on your favorite torso, the blind watchmaker, time technology is not like iphone upgrades, Ancient or Recent, France’s decimal clocks, counting knots on a ship, of course people cared about keeping time back then, escapements brought us TikTok, the not so timey wimey etymology of clock, putting clock inventions in the right order, we had sundials in the 1800s, you’re holding like 20 different iphones, redefining the second, ephemris time was a “ridiculous decision”, keeping time in space without the Earth, the importance of NTP, UTC is confusing fairly for everyone, what is speech? language vs speech, are there speech fossils? diaphragm is the only one we don’t talk about, laryngeal descent theory, teaching monkeys to talk, is this theory good science? “you guys are so smart”, speech research is so multi-disciplinary, you love a great review, deconstructing the theory, the reconstruction was so bad the mouth wouldn’t have been able to swallow, they forgot to check other animals for descended larynxes oops, speech may have developed waaay earlier, bodies ready for speech vs brains ready for speech, research beef, quoting “mic drop”, “i thought the answer would be simple and i was really really wrong”, one of the hardest problems in science, the birthday of birthdays, what do you need for a birthday? defining birthdays by caesium, Wurdi Youang, pharaoh “birthdays” being born as gods, celebrating my birthday by driving away evil spirits, celebrating the mother on birthdays, i brought you “pure intentions” for your birthday, Claudia Severa’s birthday invitation tablet, the first birthday candles, god i hope they get the short candles this year, and a fun science burrito blanket.
Sources:
Scientific American Chronicle of Timekeeping
Helen Morgolis' History of Timekeeping
History of the Hourglass
History of 1900s Clocks
Louis Essen's Account of Redefining the Second
Atomic Clock History
Modern Atomic Clocks
NPL on Atomic Clocks
Nasa JPL on Atomic Clocks
History of NTP
Google on NTP
The Atlantic on Modern Time Phone Lines
UTC FAQ
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The New Review of Speech Origins
The descended Larynx is not uniquely human
A ‘Mic Drop’ on a Theory of Language Evolution
Human Ancestors May have Evolved Speech more than 25 Million Years Ago
NPR on When did Human Speech Evolve
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BBC on Stargazing in Ancient Australia
The Guardian on Wurdi Youang
Calendars of the Past
Roman Birthday Rituals
24: Self Experimentation, Amputation Archaeology, and Learning to Love PowerPoint
What are the pros and perils of self experimentation? What archaeological clues do we have to the first human amputation? And why should we actually learn to love PowerPoint?
See Tom Perform PowerPoint Comedy on October 4th at Caveat NYC! (or stream it!)
Go to Ella's Women in Science Photography Exhibition in London October 25th!
We also learn about: Santorio Santorio, sitting in a chair for 30 years, two pieces of toast, 1500s diet culture, insensible perspiration, basal metabolism, the origin of sleep studies, cave dwellers and time perception, he likes caves a little too much, sleep cycle, stomach ulcers, rats in straight jackets taking ice baths like david blaine, drinking bacteria broth and winning a nobel prize, scientists will literally drink rotten milk to get a paragraph in a paper, reaching 631mph in a rocket chair, shout out to David Hunter, setting research back several decades, venereal disease, tropical hookworm, giving yourself worms for science, do not try this at home, Caroline always starts with Egypt, ancient prosthetics, Egyptian healthcare, what is a human, 1.8 million year old tooth, Georgia is a state not a country, tackling misinformation, human remain hotspot, the earliest surgery, trepanation, ancient community care, “7 days ago, that was the end of my script”, modern humans, medical knowledge is older than we realise, we’re still figuring anthropology out, Ella loves powerpoint, sweating bullets, God named powerpoint, overhead transparencies, Caroline doesn’t know what an overhead projector is, Tom and Ella are getting old, Edward Tufty is evil, Tom Lumperson is coming for Edward Tufty, everyone is a presenter, accessibility, an unfeasible culture of productivity, David Burn, Tufty vs Burn, Powerpoint Art, Powerpoint theatre, Powerpoint comedy, Tiktok is actually Powerpoint, Powerpoint as a programming language, beautiful things in the wildest places.
Sources:
Santorio Santorio
Insensible persirpiation
Weighing chair replica
Mammoth Cave Study
Michel Siffre Cave Experimenter
Michel Siffre Cabinet Interview
H. Pylori Stomach Ulcer Timeline
Barry Marshall Discover Magazine Interview
Infective dose of Campylobacter jejuni in milk
John Paul Stapp
Stewart Adams
Pritchard and Hookworms
Jasper Lawrence
Jimmy Bernot Twitter
Whipworm Clinical trials
Hookworms for multiple sclerosis
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Limb Amputation in Ancient Egyptians (2010 Paper)
The Guardian - Archeologists unearth 1.8 million Year Old Human Tooth
A Short History of Surgery by K. M. Begelman
The Oldest Amputation on a Human Skeleton in France (2007 Paper)
Upper Palaeolithic Hand Images with Missing Phalanges (2018 Paper)
Surgical amputation of a limb 31,000 years ago in Borneo (2022 Paper)
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Robert Gaskins on Naming PowerPoint
NYTimes Reporting on Microsoft Buying PowerPoint
Tufte's Article "PowerPoint is Evil"
NYTimes Teacher Interview on PowerPoint
David Byrne's Learning to Love PowerPoint
David Byrne's UC Berkley Presentation
David Byrne's Blog about the Presentation
Vulture's "Why is PowerPoint Having a Comedy Moment?"
Neil Cicierega's SlideShare Gems
The Lorde and Jack Antonoff PowerPoint
Tom Wildenhain's Paper "On the Turing Completeness of MS PowerPoint"
Tom Wildenhain's Presentation "On the Turing Completeness of MS PowerPoint"
23: Plastic's Past, Imperfect Pitch, and the Dumb History of Generation Naming
What is the history of plastic, and what could the future hold? Why is perfect pitch, not so perfect, and do any animals have it? And how on Earth did we end up with these meaningless names for generations?
We also learn about: what is plastic? plastics are an invasive species, natural plastics, explosions are at the root of a lot of science, guncotton, oops we made it explosive, should have bought those 666 horses, patent drama, ella slumdog millionaires celloid tennis balls, flammable films, pronouncing bakelite, carrier bags vs plastic bags, the great pacific garbage patch, plastic quiz, all plastics made still exist, the future of plastics, testing our perfect pitch, Tom interviews Sidney Gish, being able to tell home depot paint swatches doesn’t make you a master architect, my brain is wet wet mud, the 1 in 10,000 number is bogus, guessing sine waves vs pianos, the Levitan Effect, more people have pitch memory than perfect pitch, perfect pitch in animals, dolphin octave mirroring, mosquitos matching pitch to mate, let’s bone doooooown, playing happy birthday for rats, describing happy birthday like an alien, perfect pitch RAMPANT among birds, birds understand spectal vocoder music, what is a generation? the origins of generation names, Strauss-Howe generational theory, retrofitting a logical system from a random idea, backfilling generations to arthurian times, THEY WERE PLAYWRIGHTS, there should never just be One center for research, a london doctor once said…, generational character archetypes, social theory shouldn’t sound like a D&D campaign, millennial and their avocado toast, why don’t millennials like Blue’s Clues anymore? people have always been complaining about “lewd wicked children”, scientists vs the pew research center.
Sources:
The Science Museum: The Age of Plastic
Essentials of Polymer Science and Engineering
UN: From Birth to Ban: A History of the Plastic Shopping Bag
Nat Geo: Great Pacific Garbage Patch
The Ocean Clean Up: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Earth Day: Fact Sheet- Single Use Plastics
Climate Foresight: The Future of Plastics is Uncertain
University of Birmingham: The Fate and Sustainable Future of Plastic
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Carden & Cline's Excellent Review of the Myth's of Perfect Pitch
Marisa Hoeschele's Amazing Review of Animal Pitch Perception
Guessing Sine Waves vs Piano Notes Experiment
Pitch Memory TV Theme Experiment
Singing Happy Birthday to Rats
Starling Spectral Shape Experiment
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Pew Research: The Whys and Hows of Generations Research
A Big Announcement...!
A very special announcement!
Episodes we recommend for new listeners:
1: Time Illusions, Electric Bees, and Fakespeares
5: The History of Pregnancy Tests, The Middlest Size, and FanFiction
19: The Science of Gay, How Many Songs Fit in DNA, and Niche Sports
22: Magnetic Mysteries, The Real Trolley Problem, and Hitchbot
How do animals sense magnetic fields? Why was the first Trolley Problem written? And who was Hitchbot?
Images we talk about:
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: the first compasses, captain McDonalds, “epistemologically unacceptable”, magnetic bacteria, magnetic dip, pooping north, the table of good boys, let’s do a study, it’s more intersting that dogs Sometimes poop north, alignment during excretion, I’d rather study dogs than leopards, we don’t know how animals sense magnetism, the beaks of birds the brains of seaturtles the tummies of honeybes and the nasal passages of rainbowtrouts, four years from landing on the moon and we haven’t put a magnet on a bird yet, quantumn eyeballs, the European Robin is famously racist, Phillipa Foot, putting hypotheticals to the test, mice actors, hypotheticals don’t predict real behavior, Foot’s paper was about abortion, you know the hippocratic oath is pretty cool actually, do no harm is not in the oath, the self driving trolley problem, dogs vs cats, ethics boards on hypotheticals, the real car trolley problem is more nuanced, a robot with a thumb, Ella beats Tom to the joke, can robots trust humans, hitchbot meets santa, hitchbot loves Ten Bundy, have you seen this robot? how do we feel when a robot dies, so thoughtful of review corner to be at the end, and… some exciting news???
Sources:
Aviation Skybrary on Magnetic Dip
Magnetoreception remains a Mystery
Finding the Magnetoreception Organ
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Britannica on the Trolley Problem
Medical Ethics and the Trolley Problem
Self-driving Car Trolley Problem
MIT's Moral Machine Experiment
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Web Archive of hitchBOT's Website
Innovation Heroes Podcast: The Hitchhiking Robot’s Guide to the Universe
DW The hitchhiking robot's guide to Germany
McMaster University hitchBOT in the Netherlands
International Journal of Social Robotics
Smith and Zeller the death and lives of hitchBOT
Fraser et al How do we feel when a robot dies?hitchBOT’s destruction
21: Paleontologist Evelyn Vollmer, Figuring out the Age of the Earth, and What Defines a Dinosaur
How old did Aristotle think the Earth was? What makes a dinosaur a dinosaur? And how did our guest get into paleontology?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: getting started in paleontology, shooting lasers at fossils, artistotle thought the earth was infinitely old, getting the 6,000 number from bible family tree math, it’s infinitely old because because, melting rocks is science, Lord Kevlin’s real name was William Thompson??? every big name in science wanted to answer this question, Darwin was embaressed and deleted his tweet about the age of the Earth, “there’s so much we don’t know, it’s hilarious”, the rock cycle, Patteron fought for lead safety, thousands millions and billions, it took 4 billion years for a species to know the age of the Earth, what is a dinosaur? “cladistics is confusing as hell”, we were naming dinosaursas as we were discovering them, rebranding dinosaurs, aquatic and flying reptiles aren’t dinosaurs, Taphonomy, who hasn’t fused their vertebra during a mating ritual, coprolite, this poop is going to inspire the shit out of someone, being okay with not using absolutes on tiktok, the new jurassic parks are trash.
Sources:
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Clair Patterson And The Age Of The Earth
How to Calculate the Age of the Earth
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Evelyn's TikTok Recommendations
Test Ep 2: Bugs on Drugs, How Much Pi do we Need, and the Blackest Black
What happens when you gives bugs drugs? How many digits of pi do we actually need? And what is the drama behind the blackest black?
Images we talk about:
- Spider Webs on Various Drugs
- Graph of Pi Approximations Across History
- The Redemption of Vanity, MIT's Blackest Black
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: how do you give a bee cocaine? cocaine is a natural insecticide, the waggle dance, actually im not going to dance it’s embaressing, “I want to be a bee so badly”, bees get withdrawl, some caterpillars are insensitive to cocaine, weaponizing caterpillars, giving spiders drugs because you’re lazy, charlotte’s web blood spider drug tests, caffeine isn’t really that bad for us, “morals will not stop humans from doing stupid things”, maybe giving elephants 3,000x LSD is bad science, cheap date flies, some animals want to get high, my favorite drug is math, what is pi? ancient pi estimates, 62.8 trillion digits of pi, how many digits of pi do nasa use? we could work at nasa as a package deal, by the 1400s we had enough pi to get us to space, and by the 1600s enough for the universe, selfish of pi to have so many numbers, why do we keep counting, tom gets an existential crisis, we all get an existential crisis, the bean, vantablack, how can you have a color?, the pinkest pink, paying someone to flip them off, the new blackest black, 99.995% light absorption, the power of productive spite, um thaaanks.
Sources:
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Giving an Elephant Too Much LSD
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Approximations of Pi over Time
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20: The Math of Conspiracy Theories, Why is Pluto not a Planet, and Animal Art
If all these conspiracy theories were real, what are the statistical odds they'd be kept secret? Why did Pluto get demoted from planethood? And can animals make art?
Images we talk about:
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: planes fly over Ella’s house? coincidence??, the conspiracy leak formula, gish gallop, the Tom & Caroline Show conspiracy, moon landing photos, the real conspiracy of climate change is with Exxon and Shell, pluto didn’t change - the definition of a planet changed, pluto is half the width of the US, what is a planet???, planets need a cleared orbit, the IAU assembly, it’s neptune’s fault! Ella quietly having an existential crisis, Mike Brown - the man who killed Pluto, why aren’t we talking about Eris?, what if we had 12 planets?, Ceres was also demoted like Pluto 200 years ago, the 8 planets are what aliens would want to visit, the kuiper belt isn’t packed with objects like you might imagine, Mike Brown’s humbleness of giving up Eris’ planethood, dwarf planet pokerap, what is animal art? what is art? Ella and Caroline write this topic apparently, Pierre Brassau, Erased DeKooning Drawing, enrichment, Naruto vs. Slater vs. Wikipedia, Lynda Barry and Howard Ikemoto on children’s art, everything is art!
Sources:
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On the Viability of conspiratorial beliefs
Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures
Study on Disbelief of Moon Landing Photos
Shell and Exxon Climate Change Conspiracy
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Library of Congress: Why is Pluto No Longer a Planet?
BBC: Why is Pluto No Longer a Planet?
Washington Post: Ever wondered why Pluto is no longer a planet?-
Metzger’s Thoughts on Pluto and what makes a Planet
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Ars Technica on the Monkey Selfie
19: The Science of Gay, How Many Songs Fit in DNA, and Niche Sports
What is the nuanced science behind homosexuality in animals and humans? Is there a single gay gene? No. No absolutely not. But how many songs could you fit into a gram of DNA, and why would you want to? And what are some of the most niche sports and why are they still so great?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Tom is an ally, 1500 observed gay animals from shrimps to apes, the adelie penguin story hidden for 100 years, dynamic region translation, dolphins are messed up, it’d be weird NOT to talk about gay animals, how is gay behavior evolutionarily beneficial? nuanced questions and bad actors, the myth of the gay gene, genes are complicated and so is being gay, the rage inducing paper that inspired this topic, Caroline’s brain is loading big numbers, what would you put write into dna?, making 70 billion copies of your own book, what’s a floppy drive?, the first iPod, the cost of DNA storage, the double but, different types of memory, storing data for longer than ipods will be remembered, we’re not allowed to take the piss out of these sports, roller derby, is throwing a goat any weirder than a sheep’s bladder or pig skin?, reaching your peak in your 40s, the sport popes have played, tickles that jiggly knowledge thing in my skull.
Sources:
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Homosexual Behaviour in Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective
An Alternative Hypothesis For the Evolution of Same-Sex Sexual Behaviour in Animals
A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation
The Proof Against the Gay Gene
The Bad Article that Inspired this Topic
Pink News Analysis of The Bad Article that Inspired this Topic
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The First DNA Data, Microvenus
200MB of DNA Storage with OK GO
The OK GO Music Video Stored in DNA
Testing the Stability of DNA Data
DNA Data Storage for 2 Million Years
The Time it Takes to Write DNA Data
Computerphile Explaining Reed-Solomon Compression
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18: Radiocarbon Revolution, Space Babies, and Nail Polish
You've probably heard of Carbon Dating, but how are Astronomy, Biology, and Nuclear Physics involved? What are the problems with having babies in space, and how many animals have had babies in space? (surprisingly more than you'd think!) And what is the history of nail polish, and more importantly, our relationship with painting nails?
Videos we talk about:
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: counting the rings in a carbon atom, Dendrochronology, Space & Life & Radioactivity, unstable tennis balls, a surprise callback to last episode, shoutout to baltimore! oh shit we can carbon date anything!! Ella is good at guessing, a rewrite of history??? OES, the real carbon dating was friendship, definitely points, what do you name a space baby? the ISS is not a safe form of contraception, sea urchin space sex, freeze dried mouse sperm resembling instant coffee, space sushi, space babies look cuter, jellyfish that don’t know the right way up, but snails do! how humans might evolve in space, Disney’s Moon Mouse Colony, what the moon teaches about Earth, Polish vs Varnish, our favorite color, fashion always goes in cycles, mummified pharaohs with nail polish, Van Gogh wasn’t color blind, he just had cheap paints, Mary Cobb was a girl boss if you will, car paint gave us nail polish, wear nail polish if you want to!
Sources:
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Janet Ambers on Chronological Methods
Fritz Schweingruber on Dendrochronology
Carbon Dating going 75,00 years Back
Overly Dramatic Carbon Dating Error Article
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17: Cosmic Rays, Eye Colors, and the Most Disliked Instrument
What exactly are cosmic rays and how do they affect us? Why do humans have so many different eye colors? And why does everyone hate the triangle so much?
Images we talk about:
- The Angel Battle of the Bands
- The Triangle in the Painting
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: pions and tiny particles with delightful names, see the rave of space, OMG particle or the What What What particle, galactic cosmic rays, anomalous cosmic rays, shower of particles, lighting a lightbulb in space, highschool physics, auroral lights, lightning scientists, speedrunning glitches, DOTA_Teabag's single event upset, airplane failure, voter fraud, red eyes, albinism, squirrels with big ol’ baby blues, America vs the rest of the world, purple eyes, epithelium, collagen, melanin, the tingle effect, ella’s piercing blue eyes, Tom’s calming brown eyes, turn your eyes blue by drinking ocean water, climate, eye colour is a new adaptation, get that paternity test guys, everyone hates the triangle, triangle historian debate, angel music battle, Garden of Earthly Delights Where’s Waldo? the triangle belongs in hell, mmm this triangle sure sounds good, the sneaky triangle concerto, you can fill violin with 1,000 baked beans! Braham’s triangle drop, creole and brazilian folk triangle music I’m not like other girls I like the triangle, find the triangles in the world.
Sources:
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Make your own Cosmic Ray Detector
Clive Saunders' Cosmic Ray Lightning Theory
DOTA_Teabag's Super Mario Speed Run
Flight Report for Cosmic Ray Incident
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American Association of Opthamology on Eye Colors
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TV Tropes "Triangles are the Worst Instrument"
James Blades' Encyclopedia Entry on the Triangle
Mark Berry's "From Angels to Orchestra" pt 1
Mark Berry's "From Angels to Orchestra" pt 2
The Percussion Encyclopedia with 5 Paragraphs on the Triangle
Liza Young's Bosch Instrument Analysis
Brahm's Symphony No.4 in E minor
Test Ep 1: Machine Learning, Caterpillar Memories, and Love Island
This week we're releasing our very first test episode of the podcast! What are neural networks? Do butterflies remember being caterpillars? And what is Love Island?
Content Warning: Mentions of suicide in the Misc Topic
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We also learn about: what is a dog? stem cell hotel, the giant squid axon, neural networks will be walking and talking soon, why is it called deep learning? Deep blue and Watson, love island AI, Amazon’s biased hiring AI, black hole imaging, completely meat circle, Janelle Shane, Getting flagged on the street to answer if butterflies remember, caterpillar soup, classically trained caterpillars, the y tube, tickling chrysalises, the rules of love island, casa amor, beauty airplane.
Sources:
Black Hole Machine Learning Algorithm
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16: The Trouble with Honeybees, Why Repeated Words Lose Meaning, and Speed Running
Follow Ella's new job's tiktok!
When we say save the bees, which bees are we talking about? What happens when you repeat a word and it loses meaning? And how could you design an experiment to figure that out? And what is speed running and why do we all love it?
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We also learn about: solitary bees dance in their spare time, 25000 species of bees, send your enemies bees in the post, Bombus terrestris, human centric beekeeping, the billion pound honey market, honey bees are important, but also bad sometimes, local bee jobs stolen by foreign invaders, bee to bee pathogens, save ALL the bees, hanging out in the park and repeating words words words, good experimental design, the meaning test tube, tuning out meaning, Zeus, pitfalls of psychology, introspection, “familiar feels”, neutral words, clever Hans, the observer expectancy effect, dream of good experiments goodnight, don’t use flash when taking a picture of your screen, Dragster, Atari, Doom, pacifist runs, Quake done quick, games done quick, lowest percent, link stares at a rupee for 17 hours, bullet time bounce
Sources:
Caroline's Paper on the Western Honeybee
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Sheila Black's Semantic Satiation Review
Titchener's Early Description of Meaning Loss
Semantic Satiation for Poetic Effect
Jakobovits Naming Semantic Satiation
Bassett and Warne Introspective Study
Lambert and Jakobovits Semantic Polarity Experiment
Schultz Constructively Criticizing Semantic Satiation
Smith Category Verification Experiment
Neural Analysis of Semantic Satiation
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A Brief History of Speedrunning
A Quick History of Speedrunning
Marimoto Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun
Zikubi! Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun
The Speedrun Where Link Stares at Rupees for 17 Hours
What is the hardest trick in Speedrunning?
15: What the Turing Test Became, Ella's Bodily Quirks, and Pub Quizes
What is the Turing Test, what has it become, and what can we learn from it? How many of Ella's weird bodily quirks do you have? And how did the pub quiz come about?
For the next month only, use code "Everything" to save 60% off your first month of MEL Science!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: the imitation game, performative gender, the alignment problem, It’s not blade runner, artifical stupidity, have you heard about eugene goostman?! the alignment problem, CAPTTTTCAHA, archival OCR, thank Turing for Duo Lingo TikToks, Timnit Gebru, Robert Miles, the sociological and economic alignment problem, Ella Syndrome, learn to roll your tongue or else! Artistotle can’t roll his tongue, ACHOO, acronyms were a mistake, spare tendons, what is your earwax texture? the one person who liked Han dynasty tests, unlucky 13, TV quizes, what if we did that? Jay's virtual pub quiz. Jay's virtual pub quiz.
Sources:
Stanford Philosophy Turing Test Page
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Turing Test 50 Year Retrospective
Github Copilot's Alignment Problem Paper
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14: Domesticating Foxes, The Oldest Potted Plant, and Crosswords
Could you domesticate a fox, and what even IS domestication? What is the oldest potted plant, and, wait, what does Caroline mean by that question? And how did Tom go from hating crosswords to loving them?
The photo we mention of Mecta the Fox Pup
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We also learn about: the first domesticated animals, one of Darwin’s sequels, floppy ears, domestication syndrome, the fox bachelor, the neural crest cell hypothesis, our version of Behind the Bastards, cited comment critiques, we all just want to learn, I’ve never seen a plant in the middle ages, we completely misinterpret the question, ella’s old man wisdom, a plant older than america, the anxious keepers of the oldest potted plant, crosswords were a fad, we were always insufferable, relearnig ocular immunity, crossword fuckery, “thirsty” well shortz, what is and isn’t general knowledge? and bad jokes with friends.
Sources:
Dog Domestication and the Dual Dispersal of People and Dogs into the Americas
Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs
The Silver Fox Domestication Experiment
Early Canid Domestication: interplay between behavioral genetics and development
Red Fox Genomic Regions Associated with Tame Behaviours
The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics
The History of Farm Foxes Undermines the Animal Domestication Syndrome
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South African Encephalartos Species
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New York Times History of the Crossword
Yes, You Can Write More Than One Letter in a Square
The Hidden Bigotry of Crosswords
How Will Shortz Edits a New York Times Crossword Puzzle (Lorelai)
13: The Golden Toad Mystery, All the Things we Left on the Moon, and the Oldest Bar Joke
What happened to the golden toad? How many things did we leave on the moon, and what are they? And what is the oldest recorded bar joke?
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We also learn about: The World Wildlife Fund/World Wresting Federation, Agatha Christie’s Mystery of the Golden Toad, publication smackdowns, the amphibian apocalypse, outside my jurisdiction, double callback, the african clawed frog (from ep 5!), on this podcast we stan… Michael Collins, moon poop, moon scalpels, 4 undetonated grenades, moonquakes, no on vomitted on the moon, rating moon items, sneaking things on the moon, dogs in sumerian bars only want to open one thing and it’s disgusting, how many likes did that tablet have? reading sumerian proverbs, the dog understands take it, but it does not understand put it down.
Sources:
Thirty Years After the Last Golden Toad Sighting, What Have We Learned?
Crump, Apparent decline of the golden toad: underground or extinct?
Pounds and Fogden, Conservation of the golden toad: a brief history
Global Warming Didn't Kill the Golden Toad
First Mammal Killed by Global Warming
Stopping the Next Amphibian Apocalypse
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WSJ Article of Things we've left on the Moon
Nasa Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon
Audio Recording of Almost Forgetting to Drop Symbolic Items
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12: Thermal Biology, Why we have Periods, and Stickers
What do heat and temperature have to do with biology? (It turns out, a lot!) We know what periods are, but why do humans have them? And stickers are delightful but how did they come about?
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We also learn about: what is heat? endotherms ectotherms homeotherms heterotherms and poikilotherms, being warm blooded evolved twice, heat generating plants, naked mole rats are weird, the podcast's stable of strange animals grows, kleptothermy, everyone huddles, which animals have periods? mansplaining periods, elphant shrews, convergent evolution of periods, spontaneous decidualization, "pregnancy is parasitic", women's reproductive research is underfunded, georgian beauty standards, stamp based tangents, bumper stickers, and our favorite stickers.
Sources:
Richard Feynman's "Six Easy Pieces" Book
McKechnie's Blog Post on the paper
Beehive Temperature Regulation
Color Changing Thermal Biology
Poikilothermy and Huddling in Naked Mole Rats
Forbes: Why Did Women Evolve Periods?
The Evolution of Menstruation: A New Model for Genetic Assimilation
The Significance and Evolution of Menstruation
Grackhouse's History of Stickers
11: Guest Steve Rathje, Insect Consciousness, and Theatre Science
Special guest Steve Rathje (@StevePsychology) asks us, do insects have consciousness? What, empirically, makes things go viral on social media? And what are the scientific effects of live theatre?
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We also learn about: Outgroup effects on social media, subjective experience and qualia, except for mosquitos, we share genes with bananas are they conscious? the emotional dog and the rational tail, over-anti-anthropomorphism, tiktok survey of insect consciousness, would aliens think we are conscious? Steve’s at the party talking about qualia again! Sondheim, Sarah Ruhl’s magical realism absurdist plays, Steve’s study on the effect of live theater on empathy, solving Sondheim vs Weber scientifically, antiperfectionism, the weirdness of going viral, different types of online engagement, buy our supplements!
Sources:
Steve's Social Media Paper: Out-Group Animosity Drives Engagement on Social Media
10: Video Game Epidemiology, Sneeze Smells, and Game Jams
What can a video game teach us about pandemics? What are the different things a sneeze can smell like? And what makes game jams so magical?
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We also learn about: Hakkar the Soulflayer, npc asymptomatic carriers, just reset the world and change the code!, a disease model with real people, death isn’t temporary, show us the patch notes, self protection fatigue, pandemics are complicated, “look for the helpers, you will always find people who are helping”, only humans can simulate humans, “I sneeze so much”, what scents can sneezes have? smells are weird, phantosmia, Ella channeling Tom’s bad jokes, “all the tubes are connected”, piss breath, “how are we functioning?”, Tom made indie games, the first game jam email, 100,000 Guys, the Ludum Dare, “There’s too many days” “Counter Clockwise”, Hungry Knight!, Tom’s first dream game, thesis jam, Pierrec’s french review of Tom’s game.
Sources:
Epidemiology Corrupted Blood Paper
PCGamer Corrupted Blood Article
Charlotte Eye, Ear, Note and Throat Associates on Smelly Sneezes
Bacterid Producing Sweet Smells
9: Beaver Reintroductions, Solving Mazes, and ASMR
What are the benefits of reintroducing a species after 400 years? Why do we make rats solve mazes, and can slime molds solve mazes? What is ASMR, and how did it become such a thing?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Beavery introductions, vanilla flavor usually isn’t castorium, beavers support everyone in the wetlands, Tom’s gonna make a joke, The Scottish Beaver Trial, impatient beavers, international legal beaver issues, failed reintroductions are beautiful, auto sound mmm rad, autonomus sensory meridian response, her royal majesty’s asmr, and Ella’s favorite ASMR videos.
Sources:
RSPB on Beaver Reintroductions
Scottish Wildlife Trust Report on Beavers in Knapdale
Scottish Wild Land Group on the Tay Beavers
Short-haired Bumblebee Reintroductions
Berger-Tal on Openness about Failed Reintroductions
Conservation Translocations: a Review of Common Difficulties and Promising Directions
Willard Small's First Rat Maze Study
Maze Solving Using Fatty Acid Chemistry
Advanced Morris Water Maze Study
Wire Interview with Mycologist Anne Pringle
The First Dedicated Whispering Channel
BBC Interview with Whispers Red
ASMR to Help you Sleep Beating you Until your Unconscious
1300s AD ASMR - Nun Takes Care of You in Bed (You Have the Plague)
8: Recorded Sound, Prosopagnosic Pareidolia, and Meeting David Attenborough
To start the new year we learn about the science and history of recording sound, consider whether people with Prosopagnosia experience Pareidolia, and relive what it was like for Caroline to meet the one and only Sir David Attenborough.
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We also learn about: The Phonoautograph, unplayable recordings, “drop the auto, just, Phonograph”, did you write that joke down tom, debunking Edison’s first recording, someone pretending to be a pigeon, Before or After Recorded Audio? Why did it take us so long to record audio? analog vs digital, Janet’s episode, turning pictures into audio, can you believe Janet’s new pennyfarthing? Do people with Farragolia experience glossolalia, cars do have faces, “you just turned into somebdy else”, the answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, aphantasia, throwaway sentences in studies, get high and get deep, and the Caroline Roper Studio for TikToks of Science.
Sources:
Debunking Edison's Fist Recording
The Recoording That Never Wanted to be Heard
Alexander Graham Bell's Ear Phonoautograph
The Neurons That Mistook a Hat for a Face
Prosopagnosia and Functional Fusiform Face Area
Fusiform Face Area And Pareidolia Linked
7: End of Year Q&A 2021
Today we learn about the most interesting topic of all: each other! How did we get into our science fields, and how did we meet? What's our favorite science fact to tell at parties? What advice do we have for aspiring creators?
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We also learn about: our science origin stories, Tom used to be a theatre kid, Tom’s first podcast, our first TikToks, we’re on a first name basis with Hank, how we met, that time we all freaky friday’d, Ella DESPISED Tom, really long fly sperm, clinical fun fact trials, the immortal jellyfish, hermissenda, moths, Interstellar, The Martian, Demon Slayer, Edge of Tomorrow, advice on getting started on TikTok, Bill Nye could never, The Mower, MMM Honey! and nightmares.
Videos we Mention:
Caroline’s First Science TikTok
6: Genetic Chimeras, Judas Goats, and Toys
On a surprisingly deep holiday episode, we ask, what is a genetic chimera, could it save lives, and is it moral? What are Judas Goats, and what are the challenges faced in conservation? And most importantly, what were the first toys in history and what were our favorite toys?
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We also learn about: Why are mythological chimeras all ladies? a Tom/Joe chimera, “It was very dissapointing”, “I expect better evidence”, a Judas Kiss, goats are weird, helicopter tattoos, ring-necked parakeets, relocating hedgehogs, would you download a goat? Helping other human beings, what a concept! Tom’s yo-yo tricks, children existed! the earliest toys, Ella’s duel disk, tamagotchis, and the future of toys.
Sources:
Human Chimeras That Already Exist
Interspecies Organogenesis Generates Autologous Functional Islet
Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells
Human–animal chimeras: ethical issues about farming chimeric animals bearing human organs
Feral Goat Eradications on Galapagos
Vegetation and Animal Recovery on Galapagos
Is it Ritual? or is it Children?
Split Twig Observations and Carbon Dating
5: The History of Pregnancy Tests, The Middlest Size, and FanFiction
When was the first pregnancy test? If we know the biggest and smallest sizes in the universe, what is the middlest size? What's the deal with fanfiction?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Comedy!, piss prophets, we should know better that science is weird, “Looks like the frog’s ovulating!”, we are in the middle of history, what even is an object, the centi-sand, don't fudge significant figures, Dante’s Self Insert RPF, we get carried away playing the fanfiction pairing game.
Sources:
Pee is for pregnant: The history and science of urine-based pregnancy tests
Ancient Egyptian Pregnancy Tests
Effects of Hormones on Barley Leaves
Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG)
The Long Gestation of the Modern Home Pregnancy Test
4: Randomness, What Happens Without Sleep, and Stardew Valley
What are the uses of randomness, and how do we even get it? What happens to your body when you don't sleep? And is Stardew Valley secretly... a horror game?
Links we Discuss:
Infinite Monkey Theorem Results
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Ella making random noises, chiptune drums, dice fanfiction, the infinite monkey grant, gggggggggggggg, everyone guesses 7 and picks Rock, a very funny joke for our particle physicist listeners, a million random digits, minecraft seeds, the Russian sleep experiment creepypasta, sleep themed band names, the optimal nap, do the dip kids! Maureen the rocking chair champion, um actually it’s called Apophenia, tetris fanfiction, and ludo narrative disonance.
Sources:
Humans Cannot Consciously Generate Random Number Sequences
The Predominance Of Seven And The Apparent Spontaneity Of Numerical Choices
Hannah Fry on Rock Paper Scissors
Winning at Rock Paper Scissors
Hot Hand Fallacy and Gambler's Fallacy
Galton Discussing Dice for Statistical Experiments
LHC Tippet and the Random Number Table
3: Mind Controlling Parasites, Are Elephants Right Handed, and Naruto AMVs
How do mind controlling (or rather, behavior controlling) parasites work? Are elephants right or left handed? And what is so great about Naruto Bohemian Rhapsody AMVs?
Read Tom's essay on Tor.com!
Get tickets to Ella's science comedy show!
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: being cancelled by ants, Ella tries to pronounce latin names, bugs losing their butts, the parasite of the day, thanks for the parasites Charlie! Phylogenetic Inirtia, I DON’T OWN QUEEN OR NARUTO I DONT OWN ANYTHING, and Torchwood X Florence & The Machine fanvids!
Sources:
Mind Control: How Parasites Manipulate Cognitive Functions in Their Insect Hosts
How a parasitic fungus turns ants into zombies
This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms
Parasites brainwash grasshoppers into death dive
How does rabies cause aggression?
Rabies virus modifies host behaviour through a snake-toxin
Parasite makes mice lose fear of cats permanently
Brain parasite may strip away rodents' fear of predators, not just of cats
Right or Left: Elephant calves pick their trunk handedness early on in life
2: Spooky Frogs, The Most Bones, and Witch Hunts
On this SpoOoOoky Halloween episode we learn about a slew of truly spooky frogs, investigate which animal has the most bones, and see how capitalism may have led to the rise of witch hunts!
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We also learn about: fluorescence, dinosaur eating frogs (technically), CAN A SPIDER EAT A DINOSAUR??? (NOT CLICKBAIT), frog shazam, Ella learns to love the Freddy Krueger Frog, wishing you a happy bones day, evo-devo, deregionalization, how would antlers wear pants?, the origin of gossip, down with capitalism!
Sources:
Horror frog breaks own bones to produce claws
Frogs with Claws, Frogs with Hair
New pumpkin toadlet species found
How the Newly Discovered, Mud-Loving ‘Zombie’ Frog Got Its Name
Skeletal Structure, University of Idaho
Skeleton, Postcranial, Rommel & Reynolds
Axial patterning in snakes and caecilians, Woltering et al.
From Lizard to Snake; Behind the Evolution of an Extreme Body Plan, Woltering
1: Time Illusions, Electric Bees, and Fakespeares
What does a time illusion look like? Why are bees electrically charged? Who is the real Shakespeare?
Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
We also learn about: Yanney and Laurel, bad science magic tricks, Carly Rae Jepsen's seminal hit Call Me Maybe, Temporal Odor Mixtures, how many bees are in a bolt of lightning, The Flower Dome, fake flowers and fake bees, the flat moon theory, and the Voldemort Codex.
Sources:
Dixon, N. F., & Spitz, L. (1980). The detection of auditory visual desynchrony. Perception, 9(6), 719–721. https://doi.org/10.1068/p090719
Stratton, G. M. (1896). Some preliminary experiments on vision without inversion of the retinal image. Psychological Review, 3(6), 611–617. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0072918
Stratton, G. M. (1896). Some preliminary experiments on vision without inversion of the retinal image. Psychological Review, 3(6), 611–617. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0072918
Cunningham, D., Billock, V., & Tsou, B. (2001). Sensorimotor Adaptation to Violations of Temporal Contiguity. Psychological Science, 12, 532 - 535. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.d01-17
Alais, D., Carlile, S., (2005). Synchronizing to real events: Subjective audiovisual alignment scales with perceived auditory depth and speed of sound. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(6), 2244-2247. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0407034102
Stetson, C., Cui, X., Montague P.R., Eagleman, D.M., (2006). Motor-Sensory Recalibration Leads to an Illusory Reversal of Action and Sensation. Neuron, 51(5), 651-659. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2006.08.006.
Perl O, Nahum N, Belelovsky K, Haddad R. The contribution of temporal coding to odor coding and odor perception in humans. Elife. 2020;9:e49734. Published 2020 Feb 7. https://doi.org/10.7554%2FeLife.49734
Montgomery, C., Vuts, J., Woodcock, C.M. et al. Bumblebee electric charge stimulates floral volatile emissions in Petunia integrifolia but not in Antirrhinum majus. Sci Nat 108, 44 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-021-01740-2
Trailer: Let's Learn Everything!
Science communicators Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper share anything and everything interesting! Each episode they teach each other about a science topic, answer a question, and learn about a miscellaneous topic. Whether it's bugs on drugs, temporal illusions, or reality tv, there's so much out there, so let's learn everything!
Join our Discord, message us, and follow us everywhere at
https://www.LetsLearnEverythingPod.com/
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