Podcast Transcript Sometime in the last 24 hours, most of you have used soap or detergent, either directly or indirectly. Soap, like many other things, was most likely discovered by accident thousands of years ago. Fast forward to today, and these products are used for cleaning almost everything, from our bodies to cars to dishes. …
Podcast Transcript Prisoners of war or POWs during the 20th century were a part of war. Beligerant nations had to develop systems to guard, house, and feed their prisoners, and before the war, in 1929, most countries had agreed on how prisoners would be treated in captivity. In reality, conditions for POWs differed dramatically, particularly …
Podcast Transcript Located in the Indonesian Archipelago, it is one of the newest countries in the world, Timor-Leste, or, as it’s sometimes known in English, East Timor. While geographically very close, and pretty much surrounded by Indonesia, Timor-Leste has had a history very different from Indonesia. Their histories diverged when they became colonized by different …
Podcast Transcript In the 18th century, a French astronomer who was a regular comet hunter kept finding things in the sky that weren’t comets, but they also weren’t stars or planets. So, he created a list of these objects, not because he was trying to catalog the night sky, but rather to help other comet …
Podcast Transcript For as long as humans have been watching the night sky, they noticed that every so often, during a full moon, the moon would briefly go dark, or at least change color. They often created mythical explanations for the event. Eventually, these ancient people began to record its occurrences and were able to …
Podcast Transcript In the summer of 1863, after two years of war, Confederate General Robert E. Lee felt it was possible to swiftly end the conflict by taking the fight to the Union. Up until this point, almost all of the fighting had taken place in Virginia. Lee felt that by moving to the north, …
Podcast transcript Once every 450,000 years or so, the Earth undergoes a radical transformation. The planet’s magnetic field will literally flip. The north pole becomes the south pole and vice versa. Despite the fact that we know this has happened many times in the Earth’s history, we really don’t know what would happen if the …
Podcast Transcript In the second century, the Roman Empire was arguably at its peak. The Empire was peaceful, trade was flourishing, and life was about as good as it could be in the 2nd century. Much of this was due to a string of good emperors. The last of whom didn’t just run a good …
Podcast Transcript One of the most common food items consumed today are cruciferous vegetables. Even if you aren’t familiar with the term, you almost certainly have consumed some before, and there is a good chance you do so on a regular basis. What many people don’t know is that these vegetables are actually rather modern. …