Podcast Transcript Weddings are full of traditions. Almost every aspect of a traditional western wedding involves customs that may date back hundreds or thousands of years. However, most people have no idea where these customs or traditions come from. They simply do them because that’s what you do when you have a wedding. Learn more …
Podcast Transcript Have you ever filled out a form online where you had to select a country and you noticed that one of the country options was the “United States Minor Outlying Islands”? If you have you might have wondered, what are these islands? Who lives there? And why are these islands considered minor? Learn …
Podcast Transcript The year 1972 saw two epic contests between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first was American Bobby Fischer defeating Soviet Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov for the world chess championship. The other took place on a basketball court in Munich in the gold medal game of the Olympics. It was one of …
Podcast Transcript 1902, the French governor of Indochina faced a huge problem in the city of Hanoi. They were suffering from a massive infestation of rats and the rats could carry diseases, including the plague. The governor implemented a plan to get rid of the rats. Thousands of people were recruited in the effort. However, …
Podcast Transcript Located on the French Riveria, just a few kilometers from the border of Italy, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, is the tiny country of Monaco. Monaco has several distinctions among the countries in the world, not just for its size, but for its population and its history. Learn more about Monaco, …
Podcast Transcript Secrecy is a huge part of military success. You want to be able to communicate with your own forces without the enemy finding out what your plans are. As America entered World War II, they were in need of a method of communication that couldn’t be cracked by Germany or Japan. They found …
Podcast Transcript To explore the heavens humans have made many types of telescopes. These telescopes can observe visible light, infrared light, radio waves, and even x-rays. One of the most important forces in shaping the universe is gravity. How can astronomers observe gravity? In 2002, the National Science Foundation, Caltech, and MIT managed to build …
Podcast Transcript Weather systems on Earth aren’t stable. There are cycles that weather patterns go through which can have enormous effects around the globe. There is probably no more important weather cycle than the one meteorologists called the Southern Oscillation. This cycle can have dramatic implications for temperatures and rainfall all over the world. Learn …
Podcast Transcript In the Dialogues written by Plato in the year 360 BC, he wrote of a place called Atlantis. Atlantis was a land where the citizens were half-gods and half-men, yet it was destroyed in a cataclysmic event. Ever since then people have been speculating about where Atlantis was and who the Atlantians were. …