HailCaesoo asks: What all happens when the queen of England dies? Queen Elizabeth II has reigned over the UK and the Commonwealth for almost seven decades, but it turns out what happens when she sheds this mortal coil has been planned out in detail going all the way back to shortly after she ascended the throne in the 1950s, with […]
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Joyme asks: Who first came up with the “little green men” stereotype for aliens? Flying saucers, little green men, and anal probes have been a staple of our perception of aliens for as long as most of us have been alive. The reasoning behind the latter is a obvious- human scientists also can and do learn a lot about an […]
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While you’ve probably never heard of Maspro Denkoh, a Japanese company founded in 1952 that makes various TV reception equipment, among other things, they will likely forever be remembered in the annals of business lore thanks to a rather oddball decision made by Takashi Hashiyama- the man who would head the company for a little over half a century before […]
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Diego Berri: Why is the all seeing eye on the dollar bill? A long standing bit of fodder for conspiracy theorists of the American persuasion includes various imagery found on the United States’ one dollar bill, with the most infamous of graphics on said nefarious item being the so-called “All-Seeing Eye”, more properly titled the “Eye of Providence”. To add […]
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*Just an addendum to one of the tangents I forgot to mention- pulling up like crazy in a plane while rapidly hurtling towards the ground is a phenomenal way to ensure the wings of the plane cease to remain attached to it. 😉 In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start off looking at the little known much […]
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Mark R. asks: Why didn’t people in the middle ages ever bathe? There are a variety of commonly held ideas about what it was like to live in Medieval times in Europe from a hygienic standpoint- from the idea that people chucked the contents of their chamber pots out their windows on to the streets to that they rarely, if […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start with the rather curious way in which George Eastman, founder of Kodak, died. Next up, we have a brief message from our sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of amazing classes covering dozens of creative and entrepreneurial skills. You can take classes in everything from photography […]
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The universe has been finding ways to mess with people long before Edward A. Murphy uttered his famed statement in the aftermath of Dr. John Paul Stapp strapping himself onto a rocket powered sled. One of the earliest instances of this “law” being stated explicitly happened in 1877 where Alfred Holt, in an address to the Institution of Civil Engineers, […]
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In the 1970s, BP oil pipeline workers came across a curious item about 12 miles southwest of Cruden Bay, Aberdeenshire sitting about 86 meters under the surface- an old German U-Boat. In fact, one of the last U-Boats ever sunk in WWII. Unlike so many of its fellow subs, however, this one’s demise came about owing to a sequence of […]
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In modern times if you want to show off extreme wealth, you may purchase expensive sports cars, buy a private jet, wear flashy jewelry, or, as boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. has been known to do, travel around carrying suitcases filled with sometimes millions of dollars in cash. Such extravagant displays of wealth are a trademark of the boxer with Mayweather […]
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Neikoptic asks: If I was transported back in time to Medieval times like in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court could I still talk to people or would we not understand each other? Contrary to what many a Grammar Nazi the world over would have you believe, language is constantly evolving, occasionally extremely rapidly, and there is nothing wrong […]
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Alex K. asks: Is it true that sommeliers can’t tell the difference between expensive and cheap wines? Having a seasoned tongue that can detect the subtle differences between different kinds of adult grape juice is a sure sign of class. In fact, the go-to Hollywood trope for showing that a character is refined is to give them a penchant for […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we skip the quick fact because this one took forever to research and put together and I ran out of time. 😉 Instead we jump right into the main topic which is a very real phenomenon that popped up off and on for several hundred years called Dance Mania or St. Vitus’ […]
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While getting divorced in modern times in most nations isn’t exactly a walk in the park, options at least do exist in much of the world, even in cases where one spouse would rather stay together. But this is a relatively modern phenomenon. Classically, getting divorced was almost impossible. So much so that at one point about the only way […]
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San dro asks: What happens if you never give your child a name? It turns out there are a shocking number of rules and regulations concerning what parents can name their children, when the naming has to happen by, and even a section of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child that specifically states that all people, […]
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Contrary to popular belief, a decent percentage of the human population has known definitely the Earth was roughly spherical for over two thousand years. Hardly impressive, as noted in our BrainFood Show podcast, bees also use this fact in their own absurdly fascinating navigation and in communicating directions to other bees. As for humans, we took a little longer to […]
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zhiyu89 asks: When I was a kid we used to blow on Nintendo games if they didn’t work and I’ve always wondered if this actually did anything? Once upon a time a seemingly universally known trick to get a Nintendo game cartridge to work was to simply pull it out, blow on it, then re-insert. If this didn’t give the […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at whether or not male humans can get pregnant and carry a baby to full term naturally. (Spoiler- yes and yes. And even breastfeed too! It doesn’t even require fancy science or advanced medical techniques.) Moving on to the meat of today’s episode, we jump into a variety […]
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