Transcript In 1941, a young artistic prodigy released his first motion picture. It had enormous anticipation, received incredible reviews, and earned nine Academy Award nominations. However, the film was a financial failure because the vast majority of theaters refused to show it. In the 80 years since its release, it has been named the greatest …
Transcript If you’ve done your share of flying, you are probably familiar with the three-letter airport codes which identify every commercial airport in the world. Airports like DFW, LGA, and HOU are easy to figure out. However, why is there an X in LAX? How did Washington Dulles wind up with IAD? And what is …
Transcript In the process of doing research, I often come across various stories which are interesting but might not be worthy of a full episode. They are more like snippets than stories. Every so often I save these things up for a special episode because I really hate to let things go to waste. So …
Transcript Located in the Tower of London are a collection of objects, some of which date back 800 years, which are the physical symbols of the British Monarchy. These objects have a value that would almost be impossible to measure given both their intrinsic and historical worth. Learn more about the British Crown Jewels and …
Transcript Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five who died of cervical cancer in 1951 at the age of 31. Before she passed, a tissue sample of her cancer cells was taken. Those cells have been the basis for decades of cancer and biological research, and have also been at the center of one of …
Transcript I’m guessing that almost everyone listening to this podcast has, within the last 24 hours used a zipper. They are ubiquitous at this point and most people have never given them much thought. Yet, its invention was a rather inspired leap of creativity and required the development of several other technologies before it could …
Transcript Randomness is all around us. Many of you probably think that this podcast is pretty random given that you have no clue what each day’s episode is going to be about. However, true randomness is a very different thing than something being seemingly random. While randomness is actually all around us, harnessing it for …
Transcript The rise of civilization is sometimes defined as the urbanization of humanity. The transition from hunter-gatherers to living in settlements was a fundamental transformation of human society and allowed for advanced social institutions such as kings, priesthoods, and standing armies. Since then, our settlements have gotten larger and larger, resulting in the megalopolises we …
Transcript For years people believed that there was a part of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and planes would disappear called the Bermuda Triangle. It turned out that ships and planes didn’t disappear there at any higher rate than they did elsewhere, and it just wasn’t a thing. However, researchers did find a place where …