There are lots of ways to become rich overnight: you can win the lottery, have a rich relative mysteriously perish, or you could wake up with original Banksy artwork on the side of your building. Thus was the case for Bristol native Dennis Stichcombe back in 2014 when he found his struggling after-school clubhouse, “The Broad Plain Boys Club,” had […]
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At 11:30 AM on May 12, 1913, a man was taken from his cell at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City and lead out into the prison yard. There, he was strapped into a chair in front of a wall of sandbags and prepared for execution by firing squad. But instead of a group of trained marksmen, the man […]
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When we think of weapons of war doing damage to physical things, we tend to think of solid objects, whether they be spears, swords, guns, bombs, tanks, or aircraft. But in June of 2010, a group of computer programmers stumbled on one of the most innovative of a new type of weapon that had recently emerged: one made up of […]
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The name Albert Einstein has become a byword for genius – and rightly so. The German physicist’s theories of Special and General Relativity fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the uni-verse to a degree not seen since Isaac Newton, while his groundbreaking 1905 papers on Brownian Motion and the Photoelectric Effect laid the groundwork for modern atomic and quantum theory. Yet […]
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The six Apollo missions that landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972 left an extraordinary amount of equipment behind on the lunar surface. This included Lunar Module descent stages, Lunar Roving Vehicles, ALSEP experiment packages, American flags, and over 800 items jettisoned to save weight – from EVA boots to cameras to waste bags. But among these thousands of […]
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Joseph Stalin was born in December 1878 to a Georgian family and served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1952. After the death of Lenin, he initially shared power over the Soviet Union with other officials, but he managed to gradually consolidate his position and by the 1930s became the country’s […]
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Childhood development is largely defined by vertical growth. For generations, parents have kept a story pole or even marked a door jamb with their kid’s height every birthday, or perhaps even several times per year. Whatever your height may be, and whatever height you’d like to be, one thing is certain: we can lose weight, we can dye our hair, […]
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A popular perception of our far distant ancestors is that they lived in caves. But did humans ever really live in caves en masse or is this just something that exists only in popular consciousness and not in reality? To begin with, when you think of cavemen, you probably picture thick browed simpletons clad in tattered furs, sitting around a […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we are start out with an appetizer looking at how soap actually works to get rid of microbes. Next up we have a brief message from our sponsor NordVPN. Get 68% off NordVPN! Only $3.71/mo, plus you get an additional month FREE at https://nordvpn.com/brainfoodshow Or use coupon code: brainfoodshow Next up, we […]
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The rules are simple. All that is needed is a revolver, some cartridges, and one or more players. The revolver is opened, a single cartridge loaded, and the cylinder spun. The players then take turns placing the revolver against their heads and pulling the trigger. Depending on the rules, the cylinder is either re-spun after each play or left as-is. […]
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