Podcast Transcript When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862, there was a rush of people who moved west to claim the free land that was offered. However, there was a problem. Creating physical divisions for plots of land on the prairie was difficult when there was no stone or wood. Eventually, there was …
Podcast Transcript Nuclear weapons are the most devastating things humans have ever created. They are so powerful and terrible that nations that have them strictly control how they are used and handled. That being said, over the 75-year history that nuclear weapons have existed, accidents have happened. While not common, they have happened enough that …
Podcast Transcript Most of our major divisions of time are based on some sort of natural event. A year is one orbit of the Earth around the sun. A month is one orbit of the Moon around the Earth. A day is one rotation of the Earth about its axis. However, one of the most …
Podcast Transcript Every year parts of the planet are hit by devastating typhoons and hurricanes. They can cause billions of dollars of damage and can take hundreds if not thousands of lives. But why do these storms exist? What causes their distinctive spiral shape with an eye in the middle? And why do they only …
Podcast Transcript Ninjas are awesome. They’re silent, they can turn invisible, and they can totally flip out and kill people, especially their mortal enemies…pirates. …or at least that is what popular culture would like you to believe. Were ninjas really as powerful as they are made out to be? Were they the ultimate silent assassins? …
Podcast Transcript Born in 1815, Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of the famous poet Lord Byron. Unlike her famous father, Ada did not pursue a literary career. Guided by her mother, she took a diametrically different path studying math and logic. At the age of 17, she had a chance encounter with Charles …
Podcast Transcript It seems like the sort of thing humans have used throughout our existence, but historically speaking, footwear is a relatively new invention. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans spent their entire lives barefoot. Then someone got the bright idea that it might be a good idea to put something between our feet …
Podcast Transcript In the summer of 1971, Stanford professor of psychology Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment to determine if cruelty amongst people of authority was because of the position or the people. Twenty-four men were selected and randomly assigned roles of guard or prisoner. The results were shocking and are still being debated over 50 …
Podcast Transcript Every so often, astronomers will publish photos taken with an astronomical telescope and say that the object they captured is so many billions of light years away. But how could they know the distance of something from just looking at it? Furthermore, astronomers claim that the universe is almost 14 billion years old. …