Podcast Transcript In the late 17th century, King William III of England was facing a problem. He was in the middle of a prolonged war with France, was in desperate need of money, and he had exhausted most of the traditional sources for funding a war. A proposal came forward for a new bank that …
Podcast Transcript Located in the state of Wyoming and a little bit of Montana and Idaho lies one of the greatest national parks on Earth: Yellowstone. In the 19th century, Yellowstone was declared the first national park in the world. However, what makes Yellowstone special actually dates back millions of years. The geologic circumstances that …
Podcast Transcript On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. The announcement shocked the world, especially the United States, which predicted the Soviets wouldn’t have Nuclear Weapons until the mid-1950s. The big question was, how did the Soviets make the bomb so fast? Well, the Americans inadvertently helped them, as …
Podcast Transcript Located just 50 miles off the coast of Miami, Florida, is the country of the Bahamas. It is a large archipelago of islands covering over 5000 square miles in the Atlantic Ocean. The Bahamas are a unique country both historically and geologically. It has a landscape unlike any other in the world, and …
Podcast Transcript One of the most essential aspects of archeology is dating objects from the past, and one of the most critical tools in dating historic objects is dendrochronology. Dendrochronology, also called tree-ring dating, is a scientific method used to determine the age of wood and reconstruct past environmental conditions by analyzing growth rings in …
Podcast Transcript In the third century BC, Rome faced its greatest enemy. One man, a Carthaginian general named Hannibal Barca, led an army into the Italian peninsula and terrorized Rome for over a decade, despite having fewer resources and fighting on Rome’s home turf. He handed the Roman Republic many of its most humiliating defeats …
Podcast Transcript In 1977, NASA took advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the planets to send two probes to the outermost reaches of the solar system. They sent back the best images and data available at that time about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The program was a smashing success. However, the probes didn’t stop …
Podcast Transcript On October 13, 1972, a plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team crashed into the Andes Mountains. For the following 72 days, survivors of the crash were stranded in the ice and snow, forced to survive in sub-zero temperatures, battling starvation and avalanches. Desperate to escape the mountains, two of the crash survivors trekked …
Podcast Transcript You may have noticed, on occasion, that friends you have from totally different parts of your life sometimes know each other. It often comes as a surprise, but it actually shouldn’t. It turns out that the world is highly connected via personal relationships. In fact, it has been suggested that any two people …