Let’s Learn Everything!

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.

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

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Join our Discord!

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

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

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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

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

Tom's Ingenuity Comic

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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

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!

Join our Discord!

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

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!

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!

Join our Discord!

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.

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!

Join our Discord!

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

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:

The Mickey Mouse Curve

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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 questions for our end of year Q&A episode at letslearneverything.com/question or in our discord!

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!

Join our Discord!

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

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!

Join our Discord!

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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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?

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/Videos we talk about:
Snakes in Sand
The Jerboa/Kangaroo Rat/Kangaroo Mouse

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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

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?

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Join our Discord!

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

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"

Katie's Snoopy Comics

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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

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?

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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
---
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

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

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Join our Discord!

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

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! 

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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!

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

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Join our Discord!

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

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?

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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:

Early Headphone Advertisement

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 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! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw

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?

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Join our Discord!

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

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"

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Join our Discord!

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

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

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Join our Discord!

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

Apologies all, Ella's computer kicked the bucket, so we'll be back next week with a fresh episode!

IT'S THE MAX FUN DRIVE!!!

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

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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

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!

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

NHM: Frozen Banks

TedTalk: De-Extinction

Britannica: Gene Editing

Video on CRISPR

Revive and Restore Website

MIT: The Plan to Bring Back the Passenger Pigeon

---

The TinkerToy Tic Tac Toe Computer

The Shannon Number

TuroChamp Chess AI

Newell & Simon AI Predictions

NYTimes Deep Blue Predictions

Kasparov on Deep Blue

A GoogolPlex of Go Games

Dr Fill Crossword AI

Rock Paper Scissors Robot

Poker AI

Starcraft AI

AI Survey

Angry Birds AI Paper

Another Angry Birds AI Paper

Angry Birds AI Competition

AI Birds Competition Blog

Chess.com 100 Million Users

---

Authenticity and Viewing Art Study

Intent to Deceive

Detecting Art Forgery

Detecting Art Forgery 2

Art Forgery Detective

Forgers Reveal Secrets of Paintings

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)

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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

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:

The First Emoticons

Kurita's Emojis

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Join our Discord!

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

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

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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

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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

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. 

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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.

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!

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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

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!

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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

---

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

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:

Rat Brain

Cats Sitting in Things

Bread Crumbs

---

Watch the SciShow Episode Ella Wrote!

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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

---

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

---

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

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 Kleptoparasitism List

Ash's Follow Recommendations: @luccasbiohub  @drkyliesoanes @zoe_kean_sci @sarawebbscience @astrokirsten

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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

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?

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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

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?

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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

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!

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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

---

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"

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?

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Catch Sidney Gish on Tour!

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

Plastic Bag Statistics

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

---

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

The Levitin Effect

Mating Mosquitos Hamonize

Singing Happy Birthday to Rats

Songbird Hearing Anatomy

Starling Spectral Shape Experiment

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Pew Research: The Whys and Hows of Generations Research

Millennial Means Nothing

Open Letter to the Pew Research Center on Generation Labels

The Avocado Toast Article

BBC History on Complaining about the Youths

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

Support us on Maximum Fun!

How do animals sense magnetic fields? Why was the first Trolley Problem written? And who was Hitchbot?

Images we talk about:

- Hitchbot with Santa

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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:                

Myths in Magnetosensation

Magnetic Bacteria

Aviation Skybrary on Magnetic Dip

Dogs Poop North

Leopards Poop North

The Arctic Tern's Migration

Magnetoreception remains a Mystery

Finding the Magnetoreception Organ

Quantumn Eyeballs

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The First Trolley Problem

Britannica on the Trolley Problem

Of Mice, Men, and Trolleys: Hypothetical Judgment Versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas

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

The Vessel on hitchBOT

Servo Mag on hitchBOT

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

How old did Aristotle think the Earth was? What makes a dinosaur a dinosaur? And how did our guest get into paleontology?           

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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:                

---

Aristotle's Age of the Earth

Kevlin's Age of the Earth

Clair Patterson And The Age Of The Earth

How to Calculate the Age of the Earth

---

Evelyn's TikTok Recommendations

Ariel

Myria Perez

Holly Simon

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

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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:                

---

Bees on Cocaine

Caterpillar Cocaine

Weaponizing Caterpillars

The Spider Web Drug Study

Giving an Elephant Too Much LSD

---

How Much PI Nasa Uses

Approximations of Pi over Time

How Much PI Nasa Uses

Record Number of Pi Digits

NPR on Record Pi Count

---

Vantablack's Copyright Controversy

The Pinkest Pink

Anish Kapoor's Middle Finger

The NEW Blackest Black from MIT

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:

- Pierre’s Brassau’s Art

- Erased Dekooning Drawing

- Sean Thomas’ “Case Study”

- Monkey Selfie

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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:                

---

On the Viability of conspiratorial beliefs

Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures

The PRISM Conspiracy

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The FBI Foresnic Scandal

Study on Disbelief of Moon Landing Photos

Climate Change

Shell and Exxon Climate Change Conspiracy

HBomberGuy's Vaccine Video

---

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?-

NASA: Pluto Overview

IAU 2006 General Assembly

Mike Brown, Pluto Killer

Metzger’s Thoughts on Pluto and what makes a Planet

---

Pierre Brassau's Art

Jackson Pollock

Erased de Kooning Drawing

Animal Enrichment

Do Elephants Enjoy Painting?

Ars Technica on the Monkey Selfie

NYT On Monkey Selfie

US Copyright Office Compendium of Practices

Lynda Barry's Making Comics

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?           

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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:                

---

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 Gay Gene?

The Proof Against the Gay Gene

Genetics of Sexual Behavior

The Bad Article that Inspired this Topic

Pink News Analysis of The Bad Article that Inspired this Topic               

---

DNA Data Review

The First DNA Data, Microvenus

The First Book in DNA

Additional Review of DNA Data

200MB of DNA Storage with OK GO

The OK GO Music Video Stored in DNA

NYTimes on the First iPod

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

---

Home Game on Netflix

Roller Derby

Roller Derby Rules

Buzkashi

More Buzkashi

Calcio Fiorentino/Storico

Calcio Fiorentino Nat Geo Interview

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:

- Mice in Space

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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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History of Radiocarbon Dating

Radiocarbon Revolution

Janet Ambers on Chronological Methods

Dendrochronology

Fritz Schweingruber on Dendrochronology

Cosmic Rays and Carbon Dating

Libby's Nobel Address

Libby Carbon Dates Everything

Carbon Dating going 75,00 years Back

Overly Dramatic Carbon Dating Error Article

OES (Ostritrch Egg Shell)

Carbon Dating gets Updated

IntCal20 Calibration Curve

Emilie Jager on Geochronology

---

Fertilization in Microgravity

Sea Urchin Space Sperm

Freeze Dried Mouse Sperm

Sperm Count in Space Rats

Mouse Space Baby Development

Jellyfish in Space

Snails in Space

Dizzy Space Rats

Space and Bone Density

Space Adaptations

Russian Space Cockroach

Mice Adapting to Microgravity               

---

The History of Nail Polish

Cleopatra and Nailpolish

Nail Polish History

How Stuff Works Nail Polish

Hagley History of Nailpolish

History of Cosmetics

Nail Polish Trends

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 Sistrum           

- The Angel Battle of the Bands           

- The Triangle in the Painting           

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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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Cern on Cosmic Rays

Make your own Cosmic Ray Detector

The OMG Particle

Clive Saunders' Cosmic Ray Lightning Theory

DOTA_Teabag's Super Mario Speed Run

Flight Report for Cosmic Ray Incident

Cosmic Ray Election Error               

---

American Association of Opthamology on Eye Colors

Percentages of Eye Colors

Why Blue eyes are Blue

Evolution of Eye Color

---

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

Liszt's "Triangle Concerto"

Brahm's Symphony No.4 in E minor

Bois Sec Ardoin accompanied by Triangle

Avioes' song with a triangle

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:                

NYTimes AI Hype

Amazon’s Hiring AI

Black Hole Machine Learning Algorithm

Janell Shane’s AI Weirdness

---

Caterpillar Memory Experiment

Chrysalis Memories Experiment

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

Clever Hans

Schultz Constructively Criticizing Semantic Satiation

Smith Category Verification Experiment

Neural Analysis of Semantic Satiation

---

A Brief History of Speedrunning

A Quick History of Speedrunning

Activisions Magazine Volume 1

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?

Psychonauts Devs React to Speedrunner

Tom’s Favorite TAS Speedrun

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!

https://melscience.com/sBGM/

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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

Robert Miles

Eugene Goostman

CAPTCHA Paper

reCAPTCHA Interview

CAPTCHA Difficulty

Google's reCAPTCHA Policy

Github Copilot's Alignment Problem Paper

---

Photic Sneezing

Tongue Rolling

Palarmis Longus

Armpit Smell

Cilanto Taste

23 and Me Cilantro

---

A History of Quizzing

History of the Quiz

BBC Quizzing

Pub Quiz History

Quizzism Book

International Spelling Bee

Jay's Virtual Pub Quiz

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:                

A New Origin Story for Dogs

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

---

The History Of Houseplants

Penjing

Kew Gardens

South African Encephalartos Species

Cycad Palm, Ursula Bucham

---

New York Times History of the Crossword

Margaret Farrar

Yes, You Can Write More Than One Letter in a Square

NYTimes Scumbag Controversy

The Hidden Bigotry of Crosswords

How Will Shortz Edits a New York Times Crossword Puzzle (Lorelai)

DownForAcross

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:                

The Golden Toad

Thirty Years After the Last Golden Toad Sighting, What Have We Learned?

El Niño–Southern Oscillation

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

The Chytrid Fungus

Stopping the Next Amphibian Apocalypse

Hope for the Golden Toad

---

List of Lunar Missions

WSJ Article of Things we've left on the Moon

Nasa Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon

Lunar Retroreflectors

Moonquakes

Grenades on the Moon

Correction on Moon Vomit

Biomedical Results of Apollo

Studying Moon Poop

Family Photo on the Moon

The Moon Museum

PBS Moon Museum Investigation

Audio Recording of Almost Forgetting to Drop Symbolic Items

---

Images of the Tablets

Sumerian Animal Proverbs and Fables: Collection Five

AskHistorians Thread

Proverbs from  Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

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

Endotherms and Ectotherms

Thermoregulation

Oryx Heterothermy

Quelea High Body Temperature

McKechnie's Blog Post on the paper

The evolution of Endothermy

Beehive Temperature Regulation

Desert Ant Thermotolerance

Thermogenesis in Plants

Color Changing Thermal Biology

Sloth Poikilothermy

More Sloth Poikilothermy

Poikilothermy and Huddling in Naked Mole Rats

Kleptothermy

Forbes: Why Did Women Evolve Periods?

Decidualization

The Evolution of Menstruation: A New Model for Genetic Assimilation

The Significance and Evolution of Menstruation

Grackhouse's History of Stickers

The History of Sticker Printing

The History of Postage Stamps

Avery Dennison History

Smithers: The Value of the Sticker Market

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

What Insects can tell us about the Origins of Consciousness

Steve's Theatre Paper: Attending Live Theatre Improves Empathy, Changes Attitudes, and Leads to Pro-Social Behavior

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:                

Lancet Corrupted Blood Paper

Epidemiology Corrupted Blood Paper

Wired Corrupted Blood Article

PCGamer Corrupted Blood Article

Chen 2013 Epidemic Game

Charlotte Eye, Ear, Note and Throat Associates on Smelly Sneezes

Why does my sneeze smell bad?

Acetone Breath

Bacterid Producing Sweet Smells

Losing Your Smell

Phantosmia

Ammonia Breath

Correlation of Ammonia Breath during Hemodialysis

History of Game Jams

The First Game Jam Email

Pierrec's Revied of Tom's First Game

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?           

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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:                

Beavers and Castoreum               

RSPB on Beaver Reintroductions               

Scottish Wildlife Trust Report on Beavers in Knapdale               

Scottish Wild Land Group on the Tay Beavers               

Legal Battle over Beavers               

Oranguta Reintroductions               

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               

Slime Mold Maze Study               

Maze Solving Using Fatty Acid Chemistry               

Tolman's Better Mazes               

Dashiell Maze Criticism               

Morris Water Maze               

Advanced Morris Water Maze Study               

Wire Interview with Mycologist Anne Pringle               

Crinkle Crinkle Little Shirt               

History of ASMR               

The First Dedicated Whispering Channel               

BBC Interview with Whispers Red               

Cardi B ASMR               

ASMR to Help you Sleep Beating you Until your Unconscious               

1300s AD ASMR - Nun Takes Care of You in Bed (You Have the Plague)

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:                

The Phonoautograph

Debunking Edison's Fist Recording

The Recoording That Never Wanted to be Heard

Early Sound Recordings

Alexander Graham Bell's Ear Phonoautograph

The Dawn of Digital Recording

The Earliest Recording

Prosopagnosia

Fusiforum Face Area

The Case of Ron Blackwell

The Neurons That Mistook a Hat for a Face

Prosopagnosia and Functional Fusiform Face Area

Fusiform Face Area And Pareidolia Linked

Pareidolia Question on r/Prosopagnosia

How Mental Imagery and Pareidolia are Linked

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               

Tom's First TikTok               

Ella's First Big TikTok               

Caroline's Bloodwood Tree Video               

Ella's Science Speedrun Video               

Tom's RGB Video               

Hank & John's Video about Having Each Other

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:                

Chimeras in Mythology

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

Galapagos Goat Eradication

Galapagos Project Isabella

Galapagos Judas Goats

Vegetation and Animal Recovery on Galapagos

Galapagos Invasive Species

Is it Ritual? or is it Children?

Split Twig Observations and Carbon Dating

Ancient Hedgehog Cart (via @trashbandikoot on tiktok)

Business Insider Toy List

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?

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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

Kevin Kelly NYTimes Review

Solar System Ratio Calculation

Middlest Size Calculation

Fanfiction.net

AO3

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

The Hollow Mask Illusion

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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               

Rock Paper Scissors Strategy               

Hot Hand Fallacy and Gambler's Fallacy               

How the Mind Works               

Galton Discussing Dice for Statistical Experiments               

LHC Tippet and the Random Number Table               

A Million Random Digits               

Radiation is Random               

Modern Nuclear Chemistry               

Sleep Deprivation               

Sleep Stages               

Sleep Debt               

Obesity and Sleep Deprivation               

Part 2               

Cardiovascular Health and Sleep Deprivation               

Microsleep               

Hallucinations               

Rat Sleep Deprivation Study               

Fatal Familial Insomnia               

Fatal Familial Insomnia Stories

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!           

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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               

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis               

How a parasitic fungus turns ants into zombies               

A specialized fungal parasite

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

Parasites - Toxoplasmosis

Right or Left: Elephant calves pick their trunk handedness early on in life

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               

Vampire Flying Frog               

New pumpkin toadlet species found               

How the Newly Discovered, Mud-Loving ‘Zombie’ Frog Got Its Name               

The Freddy Krueger Frog               

Freddy Krueger Frog Audio               

Freddy Krueger Frog Video

Devil Frog               

Vampire Squid               

Skeletal Structure, University of Idaho

Skeleton, Postcranial, Rommel & Reynolds

New Bedford Whaling Museum

Axial patterning in snakes and caecilians, Woltering et al.

Florida Museum

From Lizard to Snake; Behind the Evolution of an Extreme Body Plan, Woltering

Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women, Sylvia Federici

What does a time illusion look like? Why are bees electrically charged? Who is the real Shakespeare?           

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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

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!

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