In the 1700s, hydrotherapy was the panacea. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, wrote in his book that cold water plunges could cure asthma, malaria, blindness, leprosy and even cancer (wait, did that say blindness?). But by the beginning of the 19th century, well-informed physicians wanted to get more precise about curing the insane. It was believed that one of the causes of mania was ‘hot brain’, a violent heat that boiled the blood and dried out the brain. Cooling the brain seem...
Jul 06, 2023•46 min
Picture this: It’s the turn of the millennium. The dust from 9/11 is only just beginning to settle. Shrek, Rush Hour 2 and Donny Darko are packing cinemas. LeAnn Rimes, Shaggy, and Kylie Minogue top the Aria charts. Apple begins their technological invasion with the first iPod and honest little Johnnie Howard is the Prime Minister of Australia. Can you feel yourself back in that time? Can you picture what and who you used to wear/eat/do? Has immersing yourself in the events of 20 years prior mad...
Jun 29, 2023•41 min
What is it with the French and kissing? They certainly know a thing or two about romance. Imagine being serenaded with an accordion and indulging in a chocolate croissant overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Who wouldn’t want to lean into an old-fashioned smooch? But not all kissing is romantic in nature. Sometimes it’s necessary to save a life. In fact, one girl has inadvertently saved countless lives by being the world’s most kissed face. It’s our pleasure to introduce to you the beautiful Resusci-An...
Jun 22, 2023•24 min
**Warning, this episode is both very gross and very sad.** Take us back to the good old days when the air was clean, the grass was green and the cows were happy. The milk tasted better back then. Straight from the cow, gallons of creamy goodness for all to drink. But while Granny’s farm may have been fine, milk wasn’t always some magical pure product. In fact, there was a time when milk was goddamn disgusting. Let’s go back to the 1800’s when there were hundreds of whiskey distilleries in New Yo...
Jun 15, 2023•42 min
Humans have always been fascinated by the unexplained. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and, one of the most intriguing unknowns that has captured our imagination for centuries, the possibility of extraterrestrial life. UFO sightings, crop circles, close encounters with aliens and even abductions have been reported for decades. And until recently, the people making these claims were considered nutjobs. They’d watched too many X-files episodes and had gone bonkers. But then in 2016, Hillary Clinton...
Jun 08, 2023•52 min
Lithium. Anyone who had a heartbeat in the 90s knows that Nirvana song backward. Speaking of, Rod’s claim to fame is meeting Kurt Cobain and the boys but that’s a story for another time. The lithium we speak of today is the light, flammable, silvery white metal found naturally in nearly all rocks. It rose to fame as the star ingredient in the first man-made nuclear reaction. But lithium is no one-hit-wonder. Lithium is also a medication that helps to stabilise the moods of millions of people wit...
Jun 01, 2023•44 min
19th century industrial revolution times meant brilliant machines, inventions and factories. Workers were leaving rural areas en masse to find work in the city. Bloody hard, low paid and dangerous work mind you. And not only was the work shitty, but there was literally shit everywhere. Pollution, human excrement. Even dead horses on the streets. But the worst work of all? Well, that was down on the docks where the ships came in. Every day, floods of seamen would wash in from foreign parts. A “re...
May 25, 2023•36 min
You know how in sci-fi films, there’s always some freak accident in a biotech lab, leaving hundreds of people dead and authorities in a state of pandemonium? Take the highly praised anime short film, Stink Bomb, for example. A flu-ridden lab technician swallows an abandoned pill on his boss’s desk presuming (reasonably, right?) that it could only be flu medicine. Turns out it just so happens to be part of an experimental bioweapons program, causing his body to omit vapours that are lethal to eve...
May 18, 2023•53 min
We all love a good race. The competition, the rivalry, the winner revelling in their victory at the finish line. But some races don’t have a clear winner. In fact, some destinations aren’t all that clear either. In the early 1900s, the race to the North Pole was in full swing and there were two competing claims as to who got there first. The problem is, the North Pole is tricky to get to, it’s tricky to notice when you’re there and it’s also very tricky to confirm that you’ve been there in the f...
May 11, 2023•1 hr 2 min
In very intelligent and intricate ways, scientists can be a bit dumb sometimes. Imagine a golden retriever as a stand-in for Brad Pitt. They’re both mammals, they’re both beautiful, and they both eat food. We can’t possibly see anything wrong with this situation. Not too far from this absurd example is how the scientific community has thought about animal testing. Sure, mice and humans are both mammals, and both are beautiful (to their mother) but inside and out, there are some pretty big differ...
May 04, 2023•56 min
There are some things we know not to do. Crossing the road without looking, not wearing a seatbelt…and looking at the sun. A fairly intrinsic lesson we all learned at some unidentifiable point in our lives. But some people throughout history have rallied against this fundamental human law. One of them is an orange quack who ruled America for a brief, nightmarish period of time. Another is an eyeball guy (an actual ophthalmologist) William Horatio Bates, born in 1860. But did this guy start out a...
Apr 28, 2023•48 min
Indiana Jones is a cool guy. An archaeologist, an adventurer who tore shit up, stumbled his way through tunnels and over invisible bridges to uncover priceless ancient artefacts. But that’s Hollywood. In real life, ancient discoveries happen in far less exciting ways…Or do they? The typical archaeological toolbox includes dental picks, trowels, brushes and measuring tapes. No archaeologist would blow an ancient city to smithereens. Right? And only in the movies would someone accidentally lean on...
Apr 20, 2023•39 min
For centuries, religious relics have been the only means by which devout followers could interact with the divine. Let us journey into some of the gross holy relics. The bones of saints, the milk of the virgin Mary, perhaps a little finger of St Thomas. St Francis Xavier’s toes were a big hit too. This saint died of exhaustion in 1552 after converting communities across Asia and leaving myriad churches in his wake. One devoted woman visiting his corpse bent to kiss his foot, bit off his toe and ...
Apr 13, 2023•51 min
Some of the best things in life were never meant to be. Just think of your favourite food, breed of dog or childhood toy - some of these were the result of accidents and batshit crazy experiments. The good old fashioned slinky was accidental, superficially bland and, yes, a little bit dangerous. Let’s go back to one particularly scintillating afternoon in the office of Richard James, a mechanical engineer working on his device to monitor horsepower. Boring, right? Until he knocked over a spring!...
Apr 06, 2023•33 min
The whole of science is stuffed full of delicious stories, and we really want to tell you every damn one of them. But we know our little human brains can’t absorb too much at one time. So today we’re introducing our new line of Wholesome SnacksTM, where we bring you a selection of new and tasty tales that have been consumed, concentrated and reconstituted just for you. Get your bib out because, in today’s snack pack, we’ve got some real doozies for you. Our first short story starts with the firs...
Mar 30, 2023•23 min
It’s simple. We work too much. There’s evidence that shows we work too much and it’s not a fun time for anyone. So what would a world with shortened work hours and no loss in pay look like? Pretty damn good. You’d be a fool to disagree. The weekend is a sacred thing. We live for it, we get our rest from it, but the two-day weekend as we know it has only been around for about a hundred years. The history of the work cycle across the globe is actually quite varied and at times, it gets pretty wack...
Mar 23, 2023•54 min
Let’s go back to the 1960s. A time of Richard Nixon, moon obsession, hippies, the Vietnam war and… no ethics committees. Born in Oklahoma in 1930, Robert Allan Humphreys was a man of many disguises. Ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1955, Humphreys changed his name to Laud after William Laud, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury (he was very holy). Humphreys followed the traditional 1960s path…got married, got kicked out of the church and started a PhD in sociology focussing on male-t...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Alfred Ely Beach was a good and decent man. Born in 1826 in Springfield Massachusetts, Alfred loved his family, he loved the opera and he loved inventing. In fact, he invented the world’s first practical typewriter. He was legit. Hailing from a rich family in the newspaper business, Alfred made his way to New York where he learned the family trade. Heading up Scientific American Magazine, turning it into one of the most successful, powerful, and influential weeklies of its kind, Beach rubbed sho...
Mar 10, 2023•1 hr 3 min
How far would you go to get to the truth, or perhaps more pertinently, to the bottom of things? William Beaumont was one dedicated scientist. Some might say ethically… ambiguous, but hey, he was born in 1785, so, old school. Later becoming known as the Father of Gastric Physiology, Beaumont did whatever he had to do in order to understand the juicy details of the digestive system. But did he go too far? Although not medically trained in the traditional sense, Beaumont began his career as an appr...
Mar 03, 2023•56 min
Charles Vance Millar was the greatest troll ever. Born in Aylmer, Ontario in 1854, Charles was a fan of practical jokes. Some might have described him as a cantankerous man, capricious and out to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. Extremely intelligent, and top of his class in law school, Charles built a silly amount of wealth by investing in companies and real estate. Then he bought some racehorses as wealthy men do. But he was also an ass. With no love, no living relatives and a fortune wor...
Feb 23, 2023•50 min
Is your workplace overrun with unqualified managers, red tape and bureaucracy? Are you asked to sit in on arduous meetings with no real consequence when you’ve got deadlines coming out of your ears? Maybe that’s just office politics. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a deliberate ploy against you, decades-long in the making with deep roots in espionage and sabotage. Welcome, friends, to the world of citizen saboteurs. It all dates back to 1883 to the father of American intelligence, William Joseph Dono...
Feb 17, 2023•47 min
Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're separating the lupine from the canine from the vulpine. Or rather, how did wolves turn into dogs and why don’t foxes fit in? The Soviet Union in the 1930s was...
Jan 12, 2023•54 min
We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth. But... how did we come to know that? It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case. A study in Sweden in the 1930’s found that even 3 year old children had cavities in 83% of their teeth. That’s bad. That’s real bad. See, the Swedes love their sweets. They even have a special term for Saturday Candy! With the knowledge we have today, the connection between candy consumption and c...
Jan 05, 2023•46 min
Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're re-living the horrors of Easter Island. Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (o...
Dec 29, 2022•58 min
Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we try and understand why oh why people drink their own urine. Ok... to people who don't do it, it's weird and gross and wrong. But to people who do do it, it's bas...
Dec 22, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work. So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly? At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone. But Lilly wasn't just anyone. See, at 16 he had a pretty profound question: whether the mind could render itself sufficiently objective ...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying. Back in the Victorian era ‘recipes’ for the perfect fly-tying involved the most exotic of materials - fancy threads, unusual bits of fur and, most importantly, exotic and rare feathers. Of course, you’d imagine the point of creating these elaborate flys is to sucker in the bigg...
Nov 24, 2022•43 min
Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it? This has been a long-standing challenge and the military’s best attempts were all pretty average. Low visibility grey was their answer. Not a great answer, but an answer. In April 1917, German U-boats were sinking 8 battleships a day! Grey battleships were not cutting it. The person who came forward with a solution was no less than an artist f...
Nov 18, 2022•53 min
Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum? Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot. But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science. And so today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (thoug...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD! If there’s one thing you can rely on history to provide, it’s infinite examples of how men across the ages have laboured to enhance, increase, or at the very least enable performance… Erectile dysfunction shows up in Egyptian tombs, Greek cup paintings, and even the Old Testament, with no li...
Nov 03, 2022•55 min
