A Little Bit Of Science

What are girls good for? Well, in the 1800s, the answer to that question was plain as day: birthing children and keeping house. In fact, in 1885, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published a column declaring that a woman who worked outside the home was "a monstrosity”! This outrageously sexist column sparked a fiery response from one hell of a young woman. Born Elizabeth Cochran and known later and more famously as Nellie Bly, at age 21 wrote back a response under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl”. Something in Nellie’s passionate letter appealed to the newspaper editor, George Madden, who eventually offered her a full-time job writing on issues affecting working women. Unfortunately, the factory owners got their knickers in a knot about her writing (likely calling out sexist behaviour) so she was reassigned to where women belong - fashion, society, gardening and the like. Screw that! In a time when women were treated atrociously, Nellie fought back. Unhappy with her assignment to the lifestyle section, she embarked on a mission that would change the course of journalism forever. After a 6-month stint in Mexico reporting as a foreign correspondent during Porfirio Diaz’s tyrannical dictatorship (at age 21, mind you), Nellie decided it was time for the big smoke. Off to New York City she went, facing rejection after rejection from every newspaper (well, she was a woman) until finally she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. It was here that she began her remarkable foray into the as-yet-unknown career of investigative journalism. Her first mission: expose the appalling treatment of patients in the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum. A casual stroll around the exterior and interview with a staffer would simply not do for Nellie’s standards. She opted for undercover, which meant feigning insanity to get herself committed… and hopefully returning home. With careful consideration, and a promise from her editor to get her out, Nellie accepted the mission and took to practising her crazy eyes in the mirror, spooking herself out with ghost stories and brushing up on her acting skills. But could she really convince doctors, police officers and judges that she was insane? Surely they would do thorough tests and discover inconsistencies that would expose her? Well, unsurprisingly, the doctors and courts were all too willing to send a woman to the loony bin back then. All she had to do was act a bit confused and not blink for a while and they were convinced. She was declared “positively demented”! Off she went with a one-way ticket to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Now we can all imagine what Nellie was subjected to while under good and proper care in a mental asylum in the 1800s. Cold rotten food, a harsh scrubbing at bath time from a fellow legitimately insane inmate deputised by staff, dunked in freezing water in what sounded like waterboarding; good and proper care. The thing is, once Nellie was admitted to the asylum, she no longer kept up the insane act. In fact, according to her records (yes, her editor came good on the promise to get her out - phew!) plenty of the women in there seemed sane. Yet such non-insane behaviour was met with a suspicion of trickery from staff, only further confirming their judgements of these poor women, condemned to a life of inhumane treatment. What a catch-22! After her exposé on Blackwell Island, New York City spent $50k 19th-century dollars on the management of institutions housing people with mental illness. Other trailblazing journalists (pejoratively called “stunt girl journalists”) followed in her footsteps, using undercover reporting to effect change and shed light on critical human rights issues. Nellie Bly was an incredible woman! Oh, and she turned Around The World In Eighty Days into fact and set the world record for travelling around the world (72 days) and would later become a patented industrialist, novelist, national women’s hall of fame inductee, and posthumously inspired songs, musicals and movies. PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Shit Yourself Healthy: Quack Doctor Prescribed The Squirts For Everything SOURCES: Ten days in a Mad-house, by Nellie Bly Nellie’s Milestones NEW-YORK CITY ASYLUM FOR THE INSANE (WOMAN) BLACKWELL'S ISLAND See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ebenezer “Eben” McBurney Byers was the personification of the Roaring Twenties: Chairman of his own company, private box at the baseball, golf pro, ladies' man - total Great Gatsby vibes. Unfortunately, Eben had a fall one day leaving him with an injury that dented his athletic prowess. Conventional treatment failed and so his physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Moyar, suggested he try RadiThor, an energy drink advertised as “Pure Sunshine in a Bottle” and accompanied, as quackery always is, by the usual panacea claim. Eben loved it. He was back in fine form and for the next two years, he drank two or three bottles of RadiThor every day. But what was in this miracle drink? Well, not a lot. Just some triple distilled water and at least 1 microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. That means radioactive water for those non-nuclear savvy folks. So let’s look at the research showing the safety and efficacy of radium water… *crickets*. From 1918 to 1928, RadiThor was manufactured by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, owned by William Bailey, a con man known for peddling various miracle cures like Las-I-Co, which promised “Superb Manhood” for those identifying as a “man in name only”. Naturally, Bailey added “aphrodisiac” to the long list of RadiThor’s promised effects, claiming it improved blood supply to the pelvic organs and had tonic effects on the nervous system resulting in vast improvements downstairs. This claim was perfectly timed given the early 20th-century hysteria surrounding the amazing benefits of “Mild Radium Therapy”, and some ground-breaking radioactive research claiming that mild radium exposure increased passion amongst water newts. Knowing what we know now, how did Eben fair after voraciously imbibing RadiThor? Not well. Not well at all. It started with headaches and jaw pain, and rapidly progressed to widespread toothaches. X-rays showed that Eben’s body was slowly decomposing from the bones out as a result of his massive radium toxification. Decomposition was most severe in his lower skull, after two salvage facial operations, he was left completely without a jaw (!) and missing all but 6 teeth (there’s a picture in the video on YouTube… not for the faint-hearted). In April 1932, Eben Byers died of radium poisoning and was buried in a lead coffin. Unsurprisingly, a cry went out to investigate RadiThor and other radium concoctions, and the swift collapse of all the radioactive patent medicines quickly followed. But somehow, radium water manufacturer William Bailey never stopped insisting RadiThor was safe. In fact, he drank more than Eben did and was “as fit as a fiddle.” He suffered no legal consequences for selling the stuff and died a very wealthy man. Fun epilogue, 20 years after Bailey died (of bladder cancer), medical researchers exhumed him and discovered that his skeleton was absolutely ravaged by radiation. How he managed to avoid radiation poisoning whilst alive remains a mystery. Perhaps in formulating his energy drink, he shouldn’t have taken the word “energy” quite so literally. PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard and The Origin of Performance Enhancing Drugs! SOURCES: Energy Drinks: An Assessment of Their Market Size, Consumer Demographics, Ingredient Profile, Functionality, and Regulations in the United States 29 Apr 2010 by M.A. Heckman, K. Sherry, E. Gonzalez De Mejia The Quack Medicine RadiThor 27 Jun, 2022 by Rupert Taylor TIME magazine - Medicine: Radium Drinks 11 Apr, 1932 When ‘energy’ drinks actually contained radioactive energy 3 Nov 2016 by Timothy J. Jorgensen Radium Cures, Museum of Quackery William J.A.Bailey & RadiThor, Wikipedia NEWSLETTER NO. 20 - Medical Collectors Association The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off ... Cancer Researcher Unearths A Bizarre Tale of Medicine And Roaring '20s Society Nov 1991 by Ron Winslow See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The notion of a humanoid machine was developed way back in the early 20th century. We’ve come a long way since then, integrating robots into every crevice of our lives. And we mean, every crevice. We’ve got robot vacuum cleaners, retail robots, manufacturing robots and military robots. But what about the sexy robots? The masturbots? The love machines? Well, we were asked a stimulating question by a listener about this particular breed of bots: Is sex with a robot cheating? As it turns out, there is peer-reviewed research on the topic and where ethics, research and sexy robots meet, you’ll always find The Wholesome Show. Now there are a few robots out there designed for giving (and receiving) sexual pleasure. The RealDollx from Abyss comes with realistic breastplates and a functioning vagina. But if you’re really in need of some loving, the Harmony line of sexbots boasts a mind-blowing X-Mode for your wildest sexual desires. These robots incorporate technology like numerous sensors, feedback, animated facial expressions, and even vaginal “arousal” detection that reacts to touch and escalates the intimacy until climax. Enthusiasts of such delightful devices are known as iDollators, Synthetiks, or robosexuals, and sometimes see their dolls as life partners rather than mere sex toys. Like Brick Dollbanger (perhaps not his real name) who, becoming disillusioned with the dating scene, formed a collection of 4 robots to keep him company. Or a French woman named Lilly, who 3D-printed her own inMoovator robot and sleeps with it every night. And we can’t forget Davecat who has “married” his computerised companion and even has a mechanised mistress too! So if these people have genuine intimate relationships with their robots, would it constitute cheating if they also had a human spouse? While some might consider sex with robots merely elaborate masturbation, others vehemently disagree with some believing thoughts and dreams of another human (or humanoid) constitute infidelity. In one survey, 42% of people viewed a spouse turning to a robot for stimulation during marriage as cheating, while 31% disagreed, and 26% were unsure. Younger respondents were more open to the idea (kids these days!). Part of the conundrum, however, is that we struggle to classify what sex with a robot actually is and therefore, whether or not it is cheating. For those who think not, what if your partner brought home a sex robot that was customised to look like their ex-partner? And for those who think it is cheating, would you classify the use of dildos or fleshlights as cheating? Yet another spectrum for us to navigate in this rich tapestry of life. Ultimately, it comes down to your personal definition of infidelity within your relationship. Talk to your partner (your human one) and get clear on each others’ thoughts before dabbling with a digital dong, mounting the mechanised manhood, or tickling the techno taco. And hey, if you’re gonna go for it, why not push the envelope with the mind-blowing X-mode? SOURCES: Emotional Intimacy and the Idea of Cheating on Committed Human–Human Relationships with a Robot, by Julie Carpenter Harmony sex robots with 'mind-blowing' new X-MODE to finally hit the market THIS MONTH Married to a Doll: Why One Man Advocates Synthetic Love, by Julie Beck RealDoll's first sex robot took me to the uncanny valley, by Christopher Trout See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Picture this: you're on a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by a vast expanse of water when suddenly, you feel a sharp pain. No, it's not a metaphorical pang of regret for opting for the slow boat rather than the quick and painless intercontinental flight; it's an actual mite bite. Welcome to the wild world of Gianluca Grimalda, a climate scientist with a penchant for slow travel and an unwavering commitment to the environment… machete-wielding gangsters, bed bugs, job loss and all. While some of us fret about recycling and turning off lights, for Gianluca, hopping on a plane is morally unacceptable as it accounts for 90% of his carbon footprint. Planes emit a whopping 2.5% of total CO2 emissions and are responsible for 4% of effective radiative forcing - a closer measure of the impact of global warming. And with literally 6 million people taking flights every single day (not to mention the thousands of empty planes airlines fly across our skies to keep their flight paths safe), those figures aren’t going to land any time soon. So what’s the solution for a dedicated German-based scientist whose fieldwork is located on the other side of the world Bougainville, Papua New Guinea? Slow travel, of course! Gianluca has had an impeccable 13-year record of conscientious objection to flying, opting for slower, more sustainable methods of travel. We’re joined by Gianluca himself today to hear about his epic journey from Papua New Guinea back home to Germany, avoiding planes and choosing ferries, cargo ships, trains, and coaches as his mode of travel. All while attempting to avoid pirates, war-torn countries, visa debacles and with this ultimatum from his boss… fly back now or lose your job. Gianluca's primary mission in Papua New Guinea is to study how people adapt (or don’t) to climate change. Coastal communities there have already relocated inland due to sea-level rise and drought-induced famines. Climate change isn't just a concept in the distant future, it's affecting them now. And rather unfairly we might add, as they tread remarkably lightly on their patch of the planet. So he made a promise to the people of Bougainville. Gianluca would reduce his carbon footprint as much as possible. Even if it meant losing his job (which he did). What a freaking legend. You might say that the best way to reduce carbon emissions would be to not travel at all. Why not take that to the extreme and kill yourself? That would sort out your emissions nicely. But considering the incredible work Gianluca is doing in these remote communities to raise awareness of what’s really happening to our planet, the reason WHY they have no crops and WHY their coastal communities have had to relocate inland… Gianluca concludes the benefit far outweighs the cost. “The more mad option, than losing my job over a single plane flight, is to return to business as usual as if earth’s resources are unbounded.” GIanluca’s commitment to his conservationist morals is nothing short of amazing. Leading by example, he hopes people who come across his amazing story will question both their need for air travel and their broader everyday decisions amidst a climate crisis actively impacting people right now. SOURCES: Climate change and flying: what share of global CO2 emissions come from aviation? Our World in Data Climate expert ‘sacked’ after refusing flight to Germany over carbon emissions, The Guardian How Many Flights Per Day Take Off and Land, Trip.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The 1980s had some memorable fads and crazes—hair metal bands, neon leotards, the Walkman… and criminal profiling! By the mid-1980s, profilers were regularly consulting with the FBI to solve challenging cases and the job was attracting big personalities. Soon after, criminal profiling became a pop-culture sensation, thanks in large part to the 1991 blockbuster, The Silence of the Lambs. One big name, and even bigger ego, in the criminal profiling world, was Richard Walter. Walter had an impressive resume, claiming to have reviewed thousands of murder cases, written criminology papers, lectured at universities, and served as an expert witness on hundreds of trials. Having worked as a staff psychologist at a prison in his earlier years, Walter had a profound understanding of the criminal mind. And he loved telling everyone about it. In 1982, Walter served as an expert witness on a trial that convicted Robie Drake of second-degree murder and sentenced him to more than 40 years in prison. Walter was able to convince the jury that an accidental shooting followed by panicked stabbing and body hiding was all based on a sexually perverse rampage by Drake in the name of piquerism (the sexual interest in penetrating the skin with sharp objects). What was the end of Drake’s freedom became the beginning of Walter's new career as a criminal profiler. Walter loved nothing more than cheeseburgers, cigarettes, reducing all motives down to sexual perversion, and being the centre of attention. Toward the end of 1989, Walter befriended Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, and Bill Fleischer, an ex-FBI agent with a penchant for murder. The three of them hit it off and formed The Vidocq Society, named after Eugène-François Vidocq, a 19th-century French criminal turned detective who is considered the father of modern criminology. Before long, The Vidocq Society was helping the FBI and county police solve cold cases left, right and centre and they were a hit with the media too. There was even a book written about the club, leveraging heavily off Walter’s impressive resume. One case in the book which Walter claimed credit for solving was the famous Australian murder case of former beauty queen, Anita Cobby. But when lead investigator, Ian Kennedy, was questioned about Walter’s involvement in the case, he had never heard of him. The same goes for the case of Paul Bernard Allain. Walter very quickly concluded that Allain’s boss had murdered him in a homosexual affair gone wrong. However, even cursory fact-checking revealed Allain didn’t appear in any legal documents or publicly recorded databases. Walter’s rebuttal: “Oh, I work on many super secret, high-profile cases that you can’t find anything out about”. Also for the record, Walter seemed to have a bit of a preoccupation with linking murders to sex crimes or homosexuality. Homosexual panic was his default motive. Now, back to Robie Drake. While serving his time in jail, Drake started doing his own profiling on Walter and asked for his case to be reviewed citing numerous lies from Walter about his own expertise. The courts eventually reviewed the case only to find further evidence against Drake (remember, Drake was definitely guilty) and extended his sentence to a further 10 years in prison BUT it was discovered that Walter had perjured himself. This triggered several other cases reliant on Walter’s expert testimony to be revisited. And as of this year, at least three murder convictions have been overturned. So how much of Walter’s resume was slightly padded versus a bold-faced lie? Why did he avoid detection and/or punishment? How many wrongful convictions and overly severe sentences remain out there? And tell me, listener, have the lambs stopped screaming? SOURCES: The Case of the Fake Sherlock - Richard Walter was hailed as a genius criminal profiler. How did he get away with his fraud for so long? 11 April 2023 The Vidocq Society: Murder on the menu Telegraph UK 21 November 2008 Drake a free man after 32 years | Local News | lockportjournal.com By Amy Wallace 6 Nov, 2014 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What do people who have a dull singing voice, contract syphilis, and die suddenly have in common? Well, according to a book (with the longest title EVER) published in the 18th century by James Morison, the answer was quite simple. Not enough poo. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1770, James Morison was a bit blocked up. Well, more than a bit. For 35 years, he lived in inexpressible suffering. Having tried every course of treatment known to the medical establishment at the time and still no relief, Morrison’s agony forced him to take matters into his own hands. Using a secret mix of herbs and spices, including aloe, a Mexican climbing plant, cream of tartar and myrrh, Morrison took to medicating himself in the form of little pills. Turns out they had quite the laxative effect and soon enough, he was feeling like a new man! Nice and empty. Morison kept his cure a secret for a while, sharing his squirty poo pills with some friends now and then. But within a few years, he decided that everyone, young and old, ailment or none, needed to take his medicine. He boasted that the squirts would cure everything. And we mean everything. So in 1825, he went to market selling his Vegetable Universal Medicine. Pills to purge yourself healthy! With claims to cure anything and everything from teething to whooping cough and sudden death, Morison started a crap-yourself-to-health campaign that went far and wide. The universal medicine was sold everywhere. You couldn't go into any apothecary, pharmacy, or even a library in England and not see Morrison's poo pills. Not only did Morison claim that his pills would cure absolutely anything, he stressed that people shouldn’t stop taking them when they felt worse, but rather, increase their doses! The more shit the better. And you should take the medicine even if you don’t suffer from any ailment. Give yourself diarrhoea just in case. Spoiler alert, this guy was a quack. Just in case you didn’t pick that up. But despite Morison's belief that you could take 40 of the pills without any ill effects, you guessed it, there were some unfortunate deaths. See, Morison sold the pills to agents who pretended to be doctors who then sold them to everyday people. One ‘agent’ named Robert Salmon was convicted of manslaughter for administering over a thousand pills over the course of 20 days to a man named John Mackenzie... for knee pain. He had taken 72 pills the day before he died a presumably excruciating death. With another 12 deaths investigated a year later, the medical establishment, whom Morison thought were a bunch of idiots, fought back fiercely. But although Thomas Wakley, editor of The Lancet, spearheaded a campaign to discredit Morison's pills and theories and warn the public about the dangers of Morison's "cure-all" remedy, The Universal Medicine pills still remained popular until the 1920s. Did Morison ever pay for his outlandish and irresponsible claims? And hey, we all love a good purge. But perhaps in the case of turds, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. SOURCES: Morisoniana, by James Morison Graphic battles in pharmacy, Wellcome Collection James Morrison: The Doctor Who Made His Patients Poop Themselves To Death, by James Felton Meet James Morison, The 19th-Century Quack Doctor Who Tried To Cure Everything With Laxatives, by Marc Hartzman The pills that cured all ills; James Morison the Hygeist (1770-1840), Kensal Green Cemetery by David Bingham See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lesson every kid needs to learn is how to share. Little ones usually want everything for themselves, but as we grow and mature, we learn that sharing is caring. But there are some who have perhaps taken sharing too far. Sperm donation. It’s a massive industry, helping hundreds of thousands of families enter into the joy of parenthood. Whether it's for altruistic reasons, the inherent desire to spread their wild oats, or just to earn some quick cash (2 minutes is all it takes), many men choose to donate. But for whatever reason, some men seem to like living that donor lifestyle a little too much, popping off as much as they can to germinate their genes far and wide. However, the consequences of rampant sperm donation can lead to unexpected and troubling encounters, especially when donors father multiple children who may unknowingly swipe right on their sibling. This happened to the offspring of a Dutch donor known as “Louis”, who was suspected of having 200 offspring, some of whom encountered each other on Tinder. Imagine this scenario: British twins separated at birth, adopted into different families, and then, unbeknownst to them, they got married. To each other. It might sound like the plot of a daytime soap opera, but it actually happened. Of course, there are rules around how much sperm one man can donate. But the rules vary from country to country and they’re not very well enforced. And for the eager beavers out there, there are ways around regulations that might impede the narcissistic spread of their seed. For one thing, they could become a fertility specialist like Dr. Jan Karbaat, who swapped out the juice cups and fathered at least 68 children, violating Dutch rules. There are also private donation clinics that not only pay a little more but just take your word for it that you’re not donating anywhere else. But the mega sperm donor award goes to Jonathan Meijer, who didn’t seem to care for regulations and is believed to have fathered hundreds of children through sperm donation. His actions came to light when the Dutch Donor Child Foundation filed a lawsuit against him for increasing the risk of accidental incest. After being blacklisted from donating in the Netherlands (he lightened his load in 11 clinics), Meijer took on a nomadic donor life, donating sperm in multiple countries and privately over the internet, often using assumed or fake names to bypass restrictions. He has confirmed children in Australia, Italy, Serbia, Ukraine, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Mexico, and the USA. Meijer saw his donations as acts of love. He was, after all, a blonde musical Viking. So what’s stopping more of these mini Meijers from hooking up with each other? And would you buy a cup of juice from a random person at a train station? SOURCES: Sperm Donor Who Fathered About 550 Children Faces Lawsuit for Increasing Risk of Accidental Incest | Complex by JOSE MARTINEZ Mar 31, 2023 Jonathan Meijer, father of up to 600 children, banned from donating sperm by Dutch court - ABC News The Case of the Serial Sperm Donor - The New York Times By Jacqueline Mroz Feb 1, 2021 Unknowing twins married, lawmaker says - CNN.com I fathered 800 children, claims sperm donor - BBC News By Natalie Morton & Sarah Bell 13 January 2016 Did a pair of twins really get married by mistake? | Family | The Guardian By Jon Henley Jan 15 2008 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

By the second half of the 20th century, humans were captivated by the idea of taming nature, making their mark on the world with colossal concrete structures. They’d gone absolutely - sorry about this - dam mad. From democrats to dictators, the latest craze for politicians around the globe was to build dams. And for good reason! Dams are used to produce hydroelectricity, provide irrigation, protect against floods and give more work for more citizens. What could be bad about a dam? Well, many many things. Yes, dams are great. But they’re also vast potential weapons of mass destruction - and they’re sitting right above our cities all around the world. Chairman Mao, the leader of the Chinese Community Party, was one who hopped on the dam bandwagon. He decided to focus his dam efforts on the Huai River, which was particularly subject to flooding, and build the Banqiao Dam. But from word go, there were some problems. The vice premier at the time said that worrying about flooding was counter-revolutionary and reactionary. Flood protection was for wusses. Instead, they wanted to focus efforts on harnessing the POWER of the water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. During the construction of the dam, one brave hydrologist named Chen Xing dared to speak up about the fact that the dam didn’t have enough sluice gates installed. Kinda a problem in the event of a flood. But he was labelled a right-wing opportunist and fired. Or sent to a labour camp for reeducation. The waters are murky on that detail. Around the same time, the Chinese government was also chopping down forests all over the place to make way for steel manufacturing. And as we know, deforestation equals changes in weather patterns and more extreme flooding. Sigh. But despite the warning signs, the dam was built in the early 1950s. It was declared to be an iron dam that could not be broken. Strong enough to withstand a one in 1000 year flood event (a storm that would unleash about 0.5 meters of rain over 3 days). And then, in August 1975, along came Typhoon Nina, creating a monstrous weather pattern that dumped three times as much water as that dreaded 1000-year event. In a few days, Banqiao dam was at capacity. So they opened up the sluice gates. Oh damn, they were too cheap and didn’t listen to Chen Xing so there weren’t enough of them. The water kept rising. Next idea - sandbags? Despite the army’s efforts to control the water (yes, they tried sandbags on top of the dam wall), the dam was soon pulverised by hundreds of billions of litres of water. Disaster struck. An inland tsunami 10 metres high and 11 kilometres wide travelled down into the valley at 50 km/h, wiping out the 9,600 citizens in the town of Daowencheng. Everything and everyone in its way was destroyed. Famine, infections and epidemics followed in the horrendous aftermath. It’s estimated that the Banqiao dam collapse killed up to 250,000 people. But here’s the thing - this all happened during a time when the Communist Party of China had a lot of control over the media... And they didn’t want anyone to know about their dodgy dam. So how long before the world knew the truth about what really happened that day? Surely nobody would deliberately collapse a dam. Would they? PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: The Potato Blight (There Is No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster) SOURCES: 230,000 Died In A Dam Collapse That China Kept Secret For Years in Ozy Reflections on Banqiao by Fiona Macleod The Catastrophic Dam Failures in China in August 1975 by Thayer Watkins The Fatal Engineering Flaws Behind the Deadliest Dam Failure in History in Popular Mechanics The Largest Act of Environmental Warfare in History by Steven I Dutch Typhoon Nina–Banqiao dam failure, in Britannica See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Every once in a while, somebody does something in the name of science that turns out to be really useful. Their research changes the world, a eureka moment catapults them onto the world stage for making scientific history. They might even be awarded a Nobel prize. But what about the science we don’t hear about? We don’t often witness the shock, the surprise, and, most importantly, the humour behind the scenes in moments of discovery. The things people set out to do that really matter to them and turn out to be hilarious. Like personally building and testing a suit of armour that would protect you from grizzly bears. Or analysing the forces required to drag sheep across various surfaces, and discovering that it's easier to drag a sheep downhill. Or one of our personal faves - a bomb that, if deployed, would make enemy soldiers become irresistibly sexually attracted to each other. Now that’s the kind of science we love to talk about. And that’s exactly why the Ig Nobel prize exists. This prize is not about making the best or most impactful discovery. The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded to someone who has done something that makes people laugh and then think. It’s bringing the jokes back into science! In this episode, we’re joined by the man himself, the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize, Marc Abrahams, to talk about where the idea for the prizes came from and some of the funny things people have done in their pursuit of science. To be clear, none of the Ig Nobel Prize winners set out to win an Ig Nobel Prize. They were all legitimately trying to discover something that they believed was important. They just didn’t know whether it would be utterly worthless or so incredible that it would change the world. The point is, it’s science. Like the Psychology Prize that was awarded to German scientist, Fritz Strack, for discovering that holding a pen in your mouth makes you happier… and then disproving himself and realising that it actually doesn't. Lol. And the Medical Education Prize that went to Japanese doctor, Akira Horiuchi, for his lessons learned from self-colonoscopy in the sitting position. Rest assured, if you're on a desert island and you do need to do a colonoscopy by yourself, it can be done! One thing that’s really cool about the Ig Nobel prizes is that if an entry doesn’t fit into an existing category, they just invent a new one. It’s wonderful to think about curiosity and play coming back into the centre of the scientific process and that every day people are being recognised for their wacky and wonderful discoveries. Did we mention that the reward for the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners was a ten trillion dollar bill? MORE FROM IMPROBABLE RESEARCH: Website: https://improbable.com/ 2023 Ig Nobel Ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9UQi0ORXv4 PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self-Experimentation! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ-e0Ld-p0w The Life and Times of Alfred Nobel https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/the-life-and-times-of-alfred-nobel Smart Toilets, Brain Pics, Corpse Comfort, Nuclear Moon, Space Fashion, and Super Conductivity https://youtu.be/WJhxFtrO9Mo?si=c7HCXK4I0wVSxqU7&t=580 SOURCES: https://improbable.com/ig/2023-ceremony/ https://improbable.com/ig/about-the-ig-nobel-prizes/ https://improbable.com/ig/winners/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cereal, the food of the gods. Who can resist the crunchy, sugary deliciousness in a box? Kids (admit it - adults too) would eat it for every meal if they had the chance. But have you ever wondered why you choose the cereal that you do? Did one in particular catch your eye? See, there’s a heck of a lot of money that goes into marketing, especially products made for kids, and especially cereal. Fruit Loops, Coco Pops, Frosties - what do they all have in common? Those happy spokes characters on the box suggest to us how delicious the cereal is with their inviting facial expressions! It’s almost like they’re gazing right into your eyes telling you to pick them up and put them in your trolley. Now one group of people who understand the importance of eye contact are marketers. And there’s a very specific reason why cereal companies place their sugary breakfast food (if we can call it food) on the lower shelves: prime real estate for kids with hungry eyes. A 2015 study led by Professor of Marketing, Brian Wansink, aimed to take an even closer look at ways in which cereal companies could persuade children to beg their parents for their products. The study was aptly named “Eyes in the aisles: Why is Cap’n Crunch looking down at my child?” It’s a great name, we’ll give them that. They already knew about the warm and fuzzy feelings spokes characters ignited in kids. What they wanted to know was, what precise angle did they need to draw their eyeballs to create direct manipulative eye contact with children in the grocery store? You’d think marketing to kids would just be a matter of whacking a bunch of colour on a box and stamping it with a happy cartoon character. But no. Apparently it comes down to trigonometry. The study was a bit outrageous really. A stupidly complicated three-step process to determine the exact eye contact angle, followed by a very loose interpretation of data and some fairly unsubstantiated claims. Like, there are actual problems in the world. And then there's this. But hey, they say breakfast is the most important meal of the day (you know who actually invented that saying? Dr. John Harvey Kellogg! Father of breakfast cereals! How’s that for an undeclared bias!?). So, do cereal sales actually increase if a spokes character locks eyes with a child in the cereal aisle? Or does the creepy eye contact make you feel watched, observed, judged and subsequently want to make a healthier choice? Perhaps carob-flavoured steel-cut oats instead. Also, what does a cereal box have in common with a Hindu god? PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Food Hacks or P Hacks: The Dodgy Insights of Brian Wansink SOURCES: Musicus, A., Tal, A., & Wansink, B. (2015). Eyes in the aisles: Why is Cap’n Crunch looking down at my child? Environment and Behavior, 47(7), 715–733. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916514528793 Cap'n Crunch is staring at your kid for a reason https://www.cnet.com/science/capn-crunch-is-staring-at-your-kid-for-a-reason/ https://www.science.org/content/article/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research IMAGE CREDITS: Toucan Sam: By Kellogg’s - Original publication: Froot Loops Marketing. Source: https://www.frootloops.com/en_US/meet-toucan-sam.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69321050 Coco Pop Monkey: By Kellogg’s. Fair Use. Source: https://www.kelloggs.com/en-za/products/coco-pops.html Tony The Tiger: By Kellogg’s, Daryl Graham - [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57229360 Snap, Crackle and Pop: By Kellogg’s. Fair Use. Source: https://www.creativereview.co.uk/snap-crackle-pop/ Cereal Box Wallpaper in Thumbnail: Armando Olivo Martín del Campo, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While some people shuffle off this mortal coil in rather ordinary ways, there are those adventurous souls who seem hell-bent on making the grim reaper scratch his head in confusion. Like drowning in a pool of beer, throwing dynamite out the window of a moving vehicle (but forgetting to roll the window down), tripping on your world record breaking beard, and death during sex. Yes, that’s right. As much as we all like getting it on, there are some people throughout history who literally went out with a bang. Like Pope John XII for example. He had his work cut out for him. Not only was he just 17 when he landed the gig as the supreme boss of the Catholic Church, but he also liked the ladies. A lot. Call him sensual, adulterous or depraved, but this guy knew how to have a good time right up until the moment of his death. Either he died of a stroke, was beaten to death with a hammer or was thrown out the window by the husband of the woman he was having… a good time with. What else would the richest and most powerful man-child of Rome be doing? Apparently, death in the saddle isn’t all that uncommon. Former Australian Prime Minister Billy Snedden succumbed to his fate during an adrenalin-filled evening with his son’s ex-girlfriend. There’s also 79-year-old Nelson Rockefeller, former US Vice President, who stayed back to work on a “project” with his 25-year-old research assistant. What a shame… He thought he was coming, but he was actually going. In 1974, Paris’ most respected senior churchman and the author of fourteen books on sexual morality, Cardinal Jean Danielou, also carked it on the stairs of a brothel. But of course, he was just on his way to offer “comfort” to a nice young lady in an official capacity only. There was also Felix Fauré, the President of France at the end of the 19th century who slipped away for some special time with his mistress. Let’s just say it didn’t end well… for either party. He died mid-act of a cerebral haemorrhage and she was left with nothing but trauma-induced lockjaw, requiring surgical removal of Felix’s lil’ friend from her mouth. Does this kind of thing just happen to old dudes who can’t handle the heat? Or are there other explanations for why some lovers seem to ride all the way to the pearly gates? Well, turns out you’re more likely to die from the deed if it’s an unfaithful one. Also doing dumb stuff like sex on balconies or in a car filling up with carbon dioxide. So how common is it for people to die while doing it? Would it be less deadly if we did it more? And wait, Viagra is implicated?! Word of caution to all those young (and old) lovers out there: Don't get naked near lions, steer clear of homemade electrical pleasure aids, and maybe don’t do it on a billiard table. SOURCES: 5 people who died during sex and 100 other terribly tasteless lists by Karl Shaw Association of Episodic Physical and Sexual Activity With Triggering of Acute Cardiac Events in JAMA by Issa J Dahabreh and Jessica K Paulus Lots of People Die Every Year During or After Having Sex. A Pathologist Explains Why on ScienceAlert Sexual and Cardiovascular Correlates of Male Unfaithfulness in The Journal of Sexual Medicine by Alessandra Fisher et al Thunderclap headache with Orgasm: A case of Basilar Artery Dissection in Clinical Communications by Elizabeth Delasobera See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One question that pervaded the minds of early European physicians was not whether we should eat human flesh, but rather which part and how much. While cannibalism might conjure up images of wild savages, it turns out medical cannibalism was all the rage back in the day... and continues to be (say what?!). The “healthy” consumption of humans goes a long way back, like in the 11th century when people started eating bits of Egyptian mummies. Nothing like a bit of powdered mummy to upgrade your muesli. They were a sought-after medicinal ingredient, rising from the dead to cure the living. By the 17th century, mummies were seen as a panacea - an entire apothecary cabinet wrapped in dry brown flesh. Delicious! The problem was there weren’t enough mummies to go around. So of course, the cunning European entrepreneurs decided to mummify executed criminals, slaves and poor people to create more magical healing goo. Think of it like a quick pickle you might do at home versus the proper jar you might buy at the store. Jamie’s 15-minute mummy. They even had special recipes. Apparently, it’s as simple as salting a corpse, cooking it in your corpse-compatible oven and grinding it into a powder. German physician, Johann Schroeder had a very precise recipe. The main ingredient was a “24-year-old unspotted redhead who had been executed and died a violent death”. After cutting the flesh, a lovely sprinkle of myrrh and aloe and soaking in spirits to keep the smell away. But medical cannibalism wasn’t just about consuming mummies. 15th-century Italian scholar, priest and philosopher, Marsilio Ficino, taught that elderly people hoping to regain the spring in their step should “suck the blood of a clean and happy adolescent”. And when fresh blood was hard to come by, a Franciscan apothecary even had a lovely blood marmalade recipe from 1679. Human fat was also a go-to healing ingredient. The executioner would deliver it by the pound to the apothecary, known to jubilantly cry out, “More cushion for the potion!” Okay, we made that tagline up, but who could resist such a morbid pun? Bones, what with all their desiccated denseness, were surely not a target for this cannibalistic quackery… WRONG! The human skull was wildly popular. 17th-century English physician, John French, offered at least two recipes for distilling skulls into spirits capable of curing stomach troubles, epilepsy and getting rid of the passion of the heart. Obviously. There was also coffin water to cure warts, and yes, even dried poo applied to the eyes via a powder was said to heal cataracts. Those crazy Euros had really tapped into the magical power of gross things. So when did all this madness end? You might be surprised to hear that it continues TO THIS VERY DAY! PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Faecal Microbiota Transplants! Anthropophagy! (It Means Cannibalism)! SOURCES: The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine, Maria Dolan, May 6, 2012 The gory history of Europe’s mummy-eating fad, Erin Blakemore May 2, 2023 A Brief History of Medical Cannibalism: Curing what ails us with mummy, blood jam, and human fat, Bess Lovejoy November 7, 2016 European ‘Corpse Medicine’ Promised Better Health Through Cannibalism, Natalie Zarrelli, October 31, 2017 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ahhh 1920s psychology… back when you could do anything in the name of science. Like traumatising a baby or making people believe they'd killed someone. The good old days. Picture this: It's 1924, and Carney Landis, a psych graduate student at Minnesota University, has an ambitious idea. He wanted to determine if humans had universal facial expressions for various emotions. Now in order to do this, he needed to recruit his fellow graduates, who were more than willing to be subjected to Landis’ various experiments. At first, it started out quite tame. A bit of jazz music, a bit of Bible reading, but no pattern of repeatable facial expressions emerged with such basic stimuli. Time to turn up the dial, bringing in new stimuli to elicit fear, disgust, sadness, and pain. Yes, that was his goal. Remember this is 1920s psychology. No rules. In comes pornographic images (likely contraband pictures of ankles and armpits) and to really get things going, some medical photos of people with horrendous skin conditions. Ewww. But still no average response. Now Landis brought in the big guns. Literally. He fired surprise gunshots in the hopes of getting some kind of universal response… But still nothing! What about getting them to stick their hand in a bucket without knowing what was inside?! It could be anything! It was in fact a bucket full of live frogs with a little surprise down the bottom - electrical wires that produced a shock. The man was a genius. Have we mentioned that one of the test subjects was a 13-year-old patient with psychological issues and high blood pressure? All above board. Carry on. Just when you’re thinking Landis would’ve packed it all in and given up on the elusive average facial expression response, he escalated the stimuli even further. Participants were presented with a live mouse and a sharp knife. Have a listen/watch to find out what he made them do (remembering the 13-year-old was roped into the study too). So did Landis reveal any universal facial expressions in response to his ever-escalating stimuli? Or did the aftermath of this classic 1920s psych experiment leave only electrocuted frogs, blown eardrums, and traumatised children? While Landis's experiment was extremely subpar on the ethical front, it does raise intriguing questions about our ability to read emotions. Humans possess a nuanced understanding of each other's emotions as seen through facial expressions alone, even if we can't pinpoint the exact facial patterns that we are picking up on. Thanks, no thanks, Landis. SOURCES Landis, C. (1924). Studies of emotional reactions. I. 'A preliminary study of facial expression." Journal of Experimental Psychology, 7(5), 325–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076072 CARNEY LANDIS | American Journal of Psychiatry The psychology experiment that involved real beheadings The Carney Landis Experiment | Bizzarro Bazar See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Believe what you will about the Gods, karma, the universe, whatever! There are some rules that even atheists should follow. Never call your boat “unsinkable”. Don’t call your machine gun “peace-producing”. And DO NOT, for the love of Shakespeare, describe your playhouse as “absolutely fireproof”. It seems that whenever arrogance takes precedence over public safety, the gods have something to say about this hubris. This episode is as horrific as you might guess, but it does make us wonder just how horrible things have to get before we make change. When the doors of the Iroquois Theater opened in 1903, it was said to be the most beautiful in all of Chicago. A masterpiece adorned with mahogany and glass doors, marble and gold pillars, and a grand central staircase. Boasting a seating capacity of 1,600 people on three levels, the Iroquois promised a night of enchantment to all. Better still, it was declared in playbills and advertising to be “absolutely fireproof”. People back then were justifiably worried about theatre fires so the architect studied every previous theatre disaster to avoid anything happening at the Iroquois. His solution and therefore justification for making such a confident (some might say arrogant) claim was a state-of-the-art asbestos curtain. If there was a fire, the stagehands would simply lower it down on stage. And as if that wasn’t enough, they also had handy Killfyre tubes (think of a poster tube with bicarb soda in it) as if they’d even be needed. But opposition to this hubris came in the form of the editor of Fireproof Magazine. Despite its claims, the Iroquois was far from fireproof. Lack of proper exits, exposed reinforcement, and inadequate firefighting equipment became glaring issues. There were also no sprinklers, alarms, telephones or water connections and only one common (albeit opulent) stairway, despite Chicago fire ordinances that required separate stairways and exits for each balcony. Caution to the wind, the fateful day arrived for the matinee performance of "Mr. Blue Beard." The audience, mostly women and children, excitedly filled every seat and occupied standing room everywhere else. As the show entered its second act, a spark from a stage light ignited drapery high above the stage. Stagehands whipped out their trusty Killfyre tubes only to find they couldn’t toss the powder high enough. Next up, the fail-safe asbestos curtain… snagged on the way down. And then it very quickly became apparent that the fire could not be contained. Panic ensued and audience members bolted from their seats toward whatever exit they could find. But you’d need the gods on your side to find an exit in the Iroquois Theater. The forward-thinking architect deliberately hid them, citing a more pleasing aesthetic. Once eventually found, the scorched patrons were greeted with a puzzling DaVinci-code-style mechanism to unlock the doors. Worse still, the doors opened inward and some were even fake, painted-on doors. There was one upper-level fire escape, but it lacked an exterior ladder down to the ground. Two large flues on the rooftop where the smoke and flame could have vented out were boarded shut. It was as if Lucifer himself designed the Iroquois. An estimated 575 people died that day and at least thirty more over the following weeks. As word of the staggering death toll spread, the city was overcome by collective mourning followed by a swift closing of all playhouses and implementation of stricter fire safety measures (enter that green glowing exit sign we’ve all seen everywhere). But was anyone held responsible for this horrifying event? SOURCES: Chicago death trap: The Iroquois Theater fire of 1903, by Nat Brandt People Thought Machine Guns Might Prevent Wars, in The Atlantic The Iroquois Theater Disaster Killed Hundreds and Changed Fire Safety Forever in Smithsonian Magazine The Tragedy of the Iroquois Theater Fire, on WTTW See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Open plan workplaces. How do we feel about them? Now, we’re all up for modernism and advancement but when it comes to actually being able to get work done, open-plan workplaces SUCK. And there’s a lot of science to back that up. Basically, nobody gets shit done if they’re distracted all day long. There’s nothing worse than really being in the zone and then your colleague decides it’s an appropriate time to tell you about the annoying wart on their foot. No privacy, no quiet space to actually think and don’t get us started on the germ factor. So how the hell are people meant to survive in the workplace without murdering everyone around them? One proposed solution was for employers to enforce quiet time for a few hours daily. No crunchy snacks allowed! Or perhaps grow a hedge around your desk so people don’t even know you’re there. Or how about your very own enormous, spine-crushing, privacy helmet? Enter The Isolator invented by Hugo Gernsback in 1925. Gernsback was a Luxembourgish-American inventor, writer, editor, engineer, designer, businessman, and magazine publisher. He was a machine and boy did he go to town with this invention. The Isolator was designed to minimise visual reach, granting the wearer absolute concentration on whatever they were doing. Picture a helmet that looks like a cross between Darth Vader's headgear and a Victorian diving bell. Despite its steampunk aesthetic, the main issue was that the helmet was so sealed that it would fill with recycled carbon dioxide, causing people to get sleepy. Not to worry. He fixed that issue by adding an oxygen tank extension to the front, making it one humungous noise-cancelling diving bell helmet. Very appealing. Unsurprisingly, Gernsback’s middle finger solution to open-plan offices didn’t get the uptake he might have expected. Workers would just have to continue to put up with the cesspool of TMI, obnoxious laughter and disease-ridden sneezes from their colleagues. Well, not if the Ukrainian design company, Hochu Rayu, has anything to do with it. Introducing the "Helmfon," a blend of "helmet" and "phone" that burst on the scene in 2017. It's not just noise-cancelling; it's a compact isolation chamber with a microphone, Bluetooth, camera, and room for your smartphone. A personal oasis of focus in the midst of a bustling office environment. Solitude in the midst of chaos. Every introvert’s dream. So are distracted and disease prone workers finding solace in these oversized tech-nerd’s-dream helmets? Perhaps the only solution is to just get rid of bloody open office spaces altogether. PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Open Plan Offices! Stats Porn! SOURCES: Why the Inventor of the Cubicle Came to Despise His Own Creation HISTORY Open plan offices are bad for business BI. 8 Proven Ways to Stay Focused in A Busy Office Staying Focused in a Noisy Open Office 7 Fullproof Ways to Block Out Noisy Coworkers for Good Zenbooth. 10 proven hacks for laser-guided focus in a busy office Creative Boom This Vintage Anti-Distraction Helmet Looks Like a Creepy Horror Show Prop This Isolation Helmet Completely Blocks Out Workplace Distractions The Isolator – A bizarre helmet from 1925 designed to improve work productivity The Vintage News Hochu-rayu See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Imagine harnessing the power of the sun using nothing more than high school science lab equipment and household ingredients. Desktop cold fusion - it would be the biggest invention of the century! Well, that's exactly what Professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann thought they’d discovered in 1989. After experimenting with a palladium cathode in a simple heavy water electrolysis cell, they observed an unexpected rise in temperature. Confusingly, they concluded the solution was nuclear fusion! (Try saying that 3 times fast) Pons and Fleischmann were so excited that they even made an announcement to the press before having their studies peer-reviewed. Unfortunately, they didn't get the standing ovation they hoped for. On the contrary, their sensational cold fusion announcement was met with an even colder reception. The scientific community quickly doused their fusion fire, proving their 'invention of the century' to be a dud. But this wasn’t the first nuclear fusion hoax and it wasn’t even the biggest. Let’s go back to 1951 to a secret laboratory in a forest on an island in a lake high in the mountains. Sounds awesome already doesn’t it? It was here that Argentine dictator, Juan Perón, made the grand proclamation that his country had successfully liberated the energy of nuclear fusion. His man behind the magic was none other than Ronald Richter, a scientist with a dubious past and an even more dubious passport. Perón gave Richter free rein to build a nuclear fusion device, with dreams of providing unlimited power (cue Perón drooling) and transforming Argentina into a world scientific leader. After his first laboratory was destroyed by a fire, Richter demanded a more protected location away from spies and potential sabotage. So the construction of a 12-metre-wide, 4-metre-thick concrete cylinder began in a location deep within the country's interior on Huemul Island - aka Project Huemul - literally plunging the nation into a brick and cement shortage! Unfortunately, when it was complete, Richter noticed a crack on the outside which rendered the entire reactor useless and ordered for it to be torn down. Determined to soldier on, Richter began experiments in a much smaller 2-metre reactor. Lithium, hydrogen and sparks were flying everywhere and on 16 February 1951, Richter claimed he had successfully demonstrated fusion. And what do all good scientists do once they demonstrate something for the first time? They tear down their experimental setup and refuse to replicate! Richter razed his cold(ish) fusion reactor to the ground to make yet another one. In the end, Richter’s work was deemed as nothing short of a grand farce, but even these flops had their place in science history. They sparked a flurry of activity in the scientific community, leading to funded projects and continued research in the field of controlled fusion including the invention of the Figure 8 Stellerator (tell me that doesn’t sound like a 1950s women’s exercise device). Whether you are right or (unequivocally) wrong, science has learned something! SOURCES: El Secreto Atomico De Huemul, by Mario Mariscotti Proyecto Huemul: The Prank That Started It All, by Robert Arnoux The Cornell Cold Fusion Archive, by Bruce Lewenstein See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you think cinema is just audiovisual entertainment, hold onto your popcorn folks, because today we're diving into an aromatic abyss of olfactory oddity when Hollywood engaged in the battle of the smellies. This isn't just a whiff of the absurd, but an honest-to-goodness tale of when Hollywood tried to tickle our nostrils along with our imagination. So did cinematic innovation cut the mustard or was it all just passing wind? Imagine going on a date to the cinemas, delighting your senses with panoramic views of Spain and then suddenly getting hit by a waft of, is that shoe polish? Welcome to "Holiday in Spain," a 1959 film that painted a whole new 'scent-scape' in the world of cinema. The film successfully broke the fourth wall, or should we say, the nose wall, by incorporating smell into the cinematic experience. It marked the introduction of Smell-O-Vision, a technology that promised an olfactory rollercoaster ride to audiences. The idea behind Smell-O-Vision was as audacious as it sounds. It aimed to titillate your smell buds (that's a thing, right?), offering a multi-sensory cinematic experience, basically treating your nose to a buffet of fragrances. But like many audacious ideas, it was easier said than done. Audiences expecting to be immersed in an aromatic plot found themselves amidst a mix of mistimed scents and a bouquet of confusion. But Smell-O-Vision wasn’t the only stinky boy in town. In a plot twist that could only happen in the '50s, Smell-O-Vision found itself nose-to-nose with its competitor, Aromarama. The late 1950s witnessed a stank-off between these technologies, each promising a sensory experience that would make your nose twitch. The fragrant face-off left audiences bemused, amused, and more than a little bit congested. Despite promising a revolutionary cinema experience, Smell-O-Vision didn't quite pass the smell test. "Holiday In Spain," the first Smell-O-Vision film, became a testament to the technology's flaws rather than its potential, ultimately evaporating from theatres as quickly as the scents it pioneered. Nevertheless, the idea of scent-enhanced cinema continued to tease the industry, making occasional cameos in films like "Polyester," which used a ‘scratch-and-sniff’ gimmick known as Odorama. Despite the smell-tacular failure of Smell-O-Vision, the dream of a multi-sensory cinema hasn't entirely vanished. From the whiff of an ambitious 'iSmell' concept in the 1990s to the 'smelling screen' of 2013, olfactory cinema continues to be a holy grail for some brave souls. But as we stand on the precipice of this aromatic abyss, one thing is clear - the journey to successfully integrate smell with cinema is proving to be one tough cookie to sniff out. And so, while we might not yet be able to smell our way through a film, we can at least tip our hats to Smell-O-Vision for the nostril novelty it brought to the cinematic table. Would you really want to smell everything you see on screen? Perhaps buttery popcorn and your date’s alluring aroma are more than enough to delight your senses. SOURCES: SCENT OF MYSTERY – Dennis Schwartz Reviews https://dennisschwartzreviews.com/scent-of-mystery/ The people who want to send smells through your TV - BBC Future https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210104-the-reason-why-you-cant-smell-television-shows-yet DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: Holiday in Spain https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s4658spai.html Smell-O-Vision - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision The Lingering Reek of Smell-O-Vision - Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/business/la-tm-oops6feb05-story.html Scent of Mystery - Variety https://variety.com/1959/film/reviews/scent-of-mystery-1200419630/ "Scent of Mystery", the First and Only Use of Smell-O-Vision : History of Information https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=4539 Behind the Great Wall (1959) - Charles Weiss, Carlo Lizzani | Synopsis, Characteristics, Moods, Themes and Related | AllMovie https://www.allmovie.com/movie/behind-the-great-wall-v229098 Michael Todd Jr., 72, a Creator Of Smell-o-Vision for Movies - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/08/arts/michael-todd-jr-72-a-creator-of-smell-o-vision-for-movies.html Polyester (film) - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyester_(film) Smell-o-vision screens let you really smell the coffee | New Scientist https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729105-900-smell-o-vision-screens-let-you-really-smell-the-coffee/ Japanese scientists create 'Smell-O-Vision' screen - CNET https://www.cnet.com/culture/japanese-scientists-create-smell-o-vision-screen/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729105-900-smell-o-vision-screens-let-you-really-smell-the-coffee/ixzz7Sw4dSahV See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everyone loves a good hack these days. It’s all about efficiency and finding ways to be even more productive. Well, that’s great for things like finding a quicker way to fold your clothes but when it comes to the workplace, the quest for more productivity can be taken a little too far. And by a little, we mean a lot. See, the aftermath of World War II left Japan in an economic disaster. Shigeru Yoshida, Japan’s prime minister at the time, prioritised rebuilding the economy by getting major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security. All the employees had to do was give their loyalty in return. But over time, workplace loyalty has become more of a ‘til death do us part’ type thing. Quite literally. Surveys have shown that one in three Japanese men between the ages of 30 and 40 work more than 60 hours a week. Overtime is the norm. In fact, it’s not unusual for people to work 80 hours of overtime each week. Oh, did we mention that overtime is unpaid work? In the mid-1980s, nearly half of all the section chiefs and two-thirds of department chiefs in major companies in Japan were concerned they might DIE from overwork. And they weren’t just being dramatic: death by overwork is so common in Japan there’s an actual term for it: Karoshi. Heart attacks, strokes, diabetic coma, liver malfunction, you name it. All happening to young, overworked employees in the name of productivity. The first case was reported in 1969 when a 29-year-old man working in the shipping department of Japan's biggest newspaper died of a stroke. As you can imagine, death by overwork is something the Japanese government wasn’t too keen on investigating. I mean, can work really be the cause of death if the person wasn’t even getting paid for it?! Weren’t they just volunteering out of genuine loyalty to the company’s values? Who needs to see their children when they could be at work til 3am, right? Besides, people already waste too much time blowing their noses, walking to the toilet and wiping sweat off their brows! They couldn’t possibly work any less. But with young employees continuing to drop dead at their desks and families seeking compensation, the Japanese government took some, albeit small, measures to keep their employees happy… and more importantly, alive. Unfortunately, telling someone they can leave at 3pm on a Friday just means they’ll have a shit tonne more work on Monday. And the employees would probably be terrified of the ramifications if they actually left before midnight. So is work really worth dying for? And does death by overwork only occur in Japan or is it a worldwide phenomenon? Surely there’s a hack or two out there to stop this madness. PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: Anthropophagy! (It Means Cannibalism)! https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/anthropophagy-it-means-cannibalism SOURCES: People fought for time off from work, so stop working so much, Fast Company Average Workweek by Country 2023, World Population Review What Is Karoshi? Behind Japan's 'Death by Overwork' Problem, Business Insider Karoshi-Death from overwork: Occupational health consequences of the Japanese production management (Sixth Draft for International Journal of Health Services - February 4, 1997) Jobs for life, The Economist Karoshi, Wikipedia See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The history of science is peppered with some pretty dubious research… grafting second heads onto dogs, growing bits of human brains inside mouse embryos, experiments with syphilis, and the list goes on. We have delivered many episodes on some pretty horrific things done in the name of science back in the day which is why we’re suitably discomforted by a study on orphan kids called “The Monster Study”. Born in 1906, Wendell Johnson stuttered grotesquely. He and his family went to great lengths to treat his stutter: sugar pills, a frightening (and disappointing) faith healer, and chiropractic work. At 16 he even attended a stuttering “school” where he chanted and swung dumbbells. None of it helped. Can’t think of why! Eventually, Johnson made his way to the University of Iowa to study English (he was more of a writing guy). Well, that university just so happened to be home to the most famous centre for stuttering research in the world. The coincidence! Diving into psychology for his master's study, Johnson became a speech pathologist because he needed one himself. The thing with speech is that you can’t test on animals so the students themselves became test subjects. They drew blood, hooked themselves to electrodes, and even shot guns off near each other's ears to see if it affected their stuttering. But it wasn’t all rogue science. Johnson made some significant observations through his early studies that convinced him that stuttering was conditioned; it was learned. Lead theories at the time were that the stuttering disorder originated in misdirected brain signals. But Johnson called bullshit. He was certain that stuttering was a learned behaviour. Damn those overreacting helicopter parents! So if stuttering was learned, that meant it could be unlearned but it also meant that it could be… taught. Enter the Monster Study, led by one of Johnson’s students, Mary Tudor. Luckily the university had an ongoing relationship with an orphanage where they could recruit unknowing research subjects. Well, that all seems above board. Within the orphanage, there were 10 kids who had an existing stutter. In weekly sessions, half of them were told to pay no attention to what others said about their speech and that they would grow out of it. The other half were told that their speech was terrible. Sigh. Another group of children who had normal speech were told they had symptoms suggestive of an impending stutter. They were told to never speak unless they could do it absolutely right! And then the last lucky group (again comprised of children with normal speech) were given compliments on their lovely enunciation. Sounds science-ish, right? Well, remember the kids who spoke normally and were scared into believing something was seriously wrong with their speech? Yeah, they stopped talking, performed worse in class, and became withdrawn and fractious. And although when they did speak, their speech was normal, they began to act like stutterers with inhibitive, sensitive and embarrassed demeanours. Feeling bad about her methods with these kids, Tudor went back to the orphanage to do some follow-up therapy. But it didn’t do much good. Her thesis sank immediately into obscurity but for a ghost life among Iowa speech pathology students; the university library its academic mausoleum. And then came the lawsuits. In 2003, three surviving orphans sued the State and University of Iowa for millions of dollars, citing among other things the infliction of emotional distress and fraudulent misrepresentation. Did the kids ever recover? And did Johnson end up finding a cause? Or is the road to stuttering paved with eagle-eared parents? PREVIOUS EPISODES MENTIONED: What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers? Omnystudio https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/what-the-hell-happened-to-the-left-handers Youtube https://youtu.be/Rfbr1YjRQ_I SOURCES: The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study', Gretchen Reynolds March 16, 2003 https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/magazine/the-stuttering-doctor-s-monster-study.html The “Monster” Study, Franklin H. Silverman, .I. Fluency disord. 13 (19881, 225-231) https://www.uh.edu/ethicsinscience/Media/Monster%20Study.pdf The Monster Study - Practical Psychology July 8, 2022 https://practicalpie.com/the-monster-study/ Why The Monster Study On Stuttering Was Unethical, Jeremy Dean https://www.spring.org.uk/2022/12/monster-study-stuttering.php See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the 1700s, hydrotherapy was the panacea. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, wrote in his book that cold water plunges could cure asthma, malaria, blindness, leprosy and even cancer (wait, did that say blindness?). But by the beginning of the 19th century, well-informed physicians wanted to get more precise about curing the insane. It was believed that one of the causes of mania was ‘hot brain’, a violent heat that boiled the blood and dried out the brain. Cooling the brain seemed an obvious solution. And so throughout the 19th century, various apparatus that harnessed therapeutic forces of water emerged to aid in “curing” the insane. And here we find the less relaxing and more barbaric origins of the shower. As we’ve discovered in many cases from that period of history, some people took it way too far. One guy who went to extremes was Dr Patrick Blair. He helped ‘cure’ a woman who was declared mad (for not wanting to have sex with her husband) by stripping and blindfolding her, tying her to a chair in a bathtub under a 35-foot high water tower, and submitting her to intense water pressure over her head, face, neck and breasts until she swore to become a loving, obedient and dutiful wife. So basically, torture. There was also Dr Benjamin Rush who made what he called a ‘tranquillizer chair’. This is where he’d strap down a patient, put a box around their head, and then begin to fill it from above, threatening them with death. He considered this a very effective strategy for resistant cases. This led others to come up with the brilliant idea of building asylums with built-in showers for administering treatment. Prisons quickly followed suit. Now, showers have come a long way since then. They became much less a torture apparatus and more of a convenience over the bathtub. The English Regency Shower, an invention far closer to our modern showers, came about in the early 1800s and by the 1870s, many houses began to have hot water pumped in through the fenestrated fixtures. But things really took off in the early 20th century, largely due to the advertising and soap industries, which capitalised on social anxieties about body odour and bad breath. Classic corporate greed preying on the dirty folk. But in the age of the microbiome, have we taken cleanliness too far? Could it be that we’re showering too much? Dermatologists will tell you that water alone strips away the oils in our skin that help to preserve moisture, leaving us susceptible to irritants and allergens. Is it time we rethink our daily cleansing rituals? Perhaps we should quit showers altogether! Like one guy in Iran who didn’t shower for over 60 years. His neighbours finally convinced him to wash and the poor guy died shortly after. Although there is one American President who had a special shower to keep him happy and healthy. It had nozzles to blast him like a fire hose in the dick, balls and butt. An odd interpretation of his second amendment rights but whatever wakes you up in the morning man! SOURCES: Australians are (nearly) global leaders in the shower stakes, in WA Today, by Ray Sparvell Bathing Habits by Country 2023, World Population Review Compulsive showering and marijuana use – the cannabis hyperemisis syndrome, in American Journal of Case Reports, by Fawwaz Mohammed, Kirby Panchoo, Maria Bartholemew and Dale Maharaj Cure-All: John Wesley throws some cold water on, well, everything. Lapham’s Quarterly. I Quit Showering, and Life Continued, in The Atlantic by James Hamblin L.B.J. Demanded White House Shower Be Fitted with Nozzles Aimed at His Nether Regions, According to New Book, in Vanity Fair, by Kia Makarechi Showering Has a Dark, Violent History, in The Atlantic by Sarah Zhang Showers: from a violent treatment to an agent of cleansing, in History of Psychiatry, by Stephanie C Cox, Clare Hocking and Deborah Payne You’re Showering Too Much, in The Atlantic by James Hamblin See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Picture this: It’s the turn of the millennium. The dust from 9/11 is only just beginning to settle. Shrek, Rush Hour 2 and Donny Darko are packing cinemas. LeAnn Rimes, Shaggy, and Kylie Minogue top the Aria charts. Apple begins their technological invasion with the first iPod and honest little Johnnie Howard is the Prime Minister of Australia. Can you feel yourself back in that time? Can you picture what and who you used to wear/eat/do? Has immersing yourself in the events of 20 years prior made you feel any more youthful? Any more topped up with vim and vigour? Perhaps even more supple? This hypothesis formed the groundbreaking research of Harvard psychology Professor Ellen Langer: Could you reverse the age-related physical and mental decline by immersing yourself in the environment of your younger self? Can you shatter the societal expectation of aging and live a youthful life until expiry? Langer, a psychology PhD at the time, began her foray into mindset manipulation by designing a pot plant study conducted in a nursing home. She gave plants to two groups instructing one that they need to care for the plans and decide their location, and informing the other group that they are not required to do anything about their new indoor foliage. 18 months later, twice as many of the grey-haired green-thumbs were alive compared with the control group. This led Langer to formulate that a person’s setting could be manipulated to improve their physical and mental state and thus turn back the clock. Unable to send old people back in time, she brought an earlier time period to the old people! In 1981, Langer helped 8 men in their 70s shuffle off a van and into a converted monastery made to look identical to a 1959 house. And we mean identical - interior decor, wall art, music, books, magazines, photos… it was all impeccably period-accurate. None of this Starbucks-coffee-cup-in-a-Game-Of-Thrones-episode malarky! A control group also spent time in the monastery though in an area void of any nostalgic decor and both groups spent 5 days in their allocated settings. The results beggared belief! Both groups improved physically and mentally however the experimental group’s gains were much more significant with an impromptu touch football game erupting on the final day of the study played by these previously frail men. Enter the critics! You have to understand, the power-of-the-mind stuff was not trending back then as it is today. In the 1980s, positive thinking and environmental manipulation on this scale were scarcely above witchcraft! Ellen was academically harangued for her hopeful hypotheses and lost her inquisitive drive. That was until the BBC recreated the experiment in 2010 with Ellen consulting called “The Young Ones” (no, not that “The Young Ones”) again showing remarkable improvements in the senile subjects: wheelchairs swapped for canes, spines were straightened, egos rekindled, and Bafta Awards were nominated. Her own vim and vigour restored, Ellen went on to conduct hotel chambermaid experiments (chambermaids informed they did, in fact, do a lot of exercise in their job lost more weight than those who believed they didn’t), hair salon studies (recently did women happy with their new do had lower blood pressures compared with those sporting a tragedy), and flight simulator tests (subjects dressed as Maverick from Top Gun performed better on eyesight testing than those in schlub duds). So when next you reach for the collagen supplements, the botox needle, or even the scalpel, think of Professor Langer and turn back the clock instead by ditching those societal expectations, believe you are in fact younger, and remember who you were 20 years ago. SOURCES: Better Believe It - A psychology professor’s quest to explain—and demonstrate—the power of the mind over our health. Dec 2022 Ellen Langer: expert on, and victim of, the illusion of control March 9, 2015 9:20 AM by Andrew What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set? Bruce Grierson. Oct. 22, 2014 Ellen Langer – Wikipedia Rodin J, Langer EJ. Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1977 Dec;35(12):897-902. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.35.12.897. PMID: 592095. Rodin, J., & Langer, E. J. (1978). Erratum to Rodin and Langer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(5), 462. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0084387 Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect January 3, 2008 Crum AJ, Langer EJ. Mind-set matters: exercise and the placebo effect. Psychol Sci. 2007 Feb;18(2):165-71. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01867.x. PMID: 17425538. Ellen Langer Harvard See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What is it with the French and kissing? They certainly know a thing or two about romance. Imagine being serenaded with an accordion and indulging in a chocolate croissant overlooking the Eiffel Tower. Who wouldn’t want to lean into an old-fashioned smooch? But not all kissing is romantic in nature. Sometimes it’s necessary to save a life. In fact, one girl has inadvertently saved countless lives by being the world’s most kissed face. It’s our pleasure to introduce to you the beautiful Resusci-Anne. Let’s go back almost 150 years ago when the lifeless body of an unidentified teenage girl was pulled from the Seine River. A tragedy indeed. At the morgue, a medical assistant was struck by the girl's serene expression and the hint of a smile that was playing on her lips. He was so struck in fact, that he decided to immortalise her tragic beauty by commissioning a death mask of her face. It was all the rage back then. Napoleon, Victor Hugo, and Beethoven, all added a mask of plaster of Paris to their posthumous beauty regime. The young woman's enigmatic face became a muse for artists, novelists and poets alike. She inspired paintings and tragically romantic stories and earned the moniker “drowned Mona Lisa” or “the unknown woman of the Seine”. Soon she became a sensation in turn-of-the-20th-century Europe but her influence extended well beyond her time. Fast forward to 1956 America. Two anesthesiologists, Peter Safar and James Elam, had heard of a promising new technique for keeping patients alive called cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The problem was, they were struggling to find volunteers to practise on owing to the fact that cracked ribs and organ damage are likely sequelae of the technique. In fact, some say that you’re doing it wrong if you DON’T break ribs. Coma patients, spouses, and even each other, no torso was off limits to the CPR inventors for practising this new life-saving technique. Though as you could imagine, this cohort of willing torsos was severely limited. Hearing about this new reviving technique, Norwegian toymaker, Asmund Laerdal, saw an opportunity to help. He’d previously lent his soft-plastic manipulating skills to the military by creating plastic models of wounds used for training military medics. They even squirted out fake blood. Awesome. But one of his best-selling toys was a baby doll named Anne. So, he offered to make a life-size adult Anne doll for the sole purpose of CPR training. Back then, nearly all doctors were male so Laerdal and Lind decided they would feel more comfortable "kissing" a female doll. So now they had a body on which trainees could practice their life-saving (and bone-breaking) CPR. And her face? Well, while visiting relatives, Laerdal spotted the serenely smiling death mask of the aforementioned "unknown woman of the Seine" on their wall. And so, he created a CPR mannequin with the face of a dead 19th-century French girl, still known today as Resusci Anne. It’s estimated that 300 million people worldwide have been trained in CPR, most of them having “kissed” her beautiful face. But could a dead person really look that beautiful? The fact that her face was so serene made it hard to believe that she was a victim of drowning. Usually, people get pretty panicky, swollen and decomposed in that situation. It’s not pretty. So who was this immortalised beauty? A long-lost twin who’d embarked on a love affair with a rich suitor and eloped to Paris? How very French. Or perhaps a Hungarian actress who was murdered by her lover! And what’s this all got to do with Michael Jackson? SOURCES: National EMS Museum: The Evolution of Resusci-Annie BBC News: Resusci Anne and L'Inconnue: The Mona Lisa of the Seine by Jeremy Grange How Stuff Works: How the CPR Doll Developed From a Famous Parisian Death Mask Live Science: How a girl's 'death mask' from the 1800s became the face of CPR dolls Laerdal Medical: SimMan 3G PLUS - Clinical Features See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

**Warning, this episode is both very gross and very sad.** Take us back to the good old days when the air was clean, the grass was green and the cows were happy. The milk tasted better back then. Straight from the cow, gallons of creamy goodness for all to drink. But while Granny’s farm may have been fine, milk wasn’t always some magical pure product. In fact, there was a time when milk was goddamn disgusting. Let’s go back to the 1800’s when there were hundreds of whiskey distilleries in New York State. Some lunatic had the great idea to feed the leftover rank grain goop to the cows. Weirdly, they noticed that the cows increased their secretion of milk afterwards. Thus began the distillery dairies. All across America and Europe, dairies joined forces with distilleries, serving the boiling slurry, or swill, which was said to be acidic enough to corrode iron, to their cows. Day in, day out, with no water or harder grass to chew on, the poor cows were chained up in a windowless metal shed right next to the distilleries. They were definitely not happy. Needless to say, the cows got bloody sick. With ulcerated sores all over their body, including on their udders, many cows' teeth went rotten and fell out from the hot acidic food. Most lost their tails, some lost their hooves and sometimes their legs would fall off. But every day the distillery milkers would come, no matter the condition of the cow, to get their goddamn milk. Milk is a generous term here. The resulting liquid was described by Robert Hartley, a man who wrote a book to expose the horrors of these distillery dairies, as having an unnatural, bluish tint or riddled with reddish brown pus. But surely people wouldn’t drink it if it looked so bad. Well, that’s where the dairymen got clever. Not only did they add a bit of river water to make the milk go further, but they also discovered you could fix the colour by adding flour, plaster of Paris, chalk - either of them would do the trick. Now, to get that lovely yellowish creamy layer that the people crave, just a dash of pureed calf brains. Apparently, it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee. (We just threw up in our mouths). And if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde to stop the decomposition. Yep. Formaldehyde. You can just imagine the health department inquiries. One investigation discovered insect larvae in the milk (likely from the river water). Others found milk containing sticks, hair, blood, pus and manure. In fact, one estimate said that people consumed more than 2,000 pounds of manure in a given year. As you can guess, many people got sick and died. So why were people still drinking the damn stuff? And why wasn’t anything being done about these horrific distillery dairies? No one listened to Robert Hartley or took notice of his book. So it was up to Frank Leslie. Frank found a particularly pus riven bottle of milk on his doorstep one morning that was udderly disgusting so he decided it was time for a shake down. See, Frank was a newspaper guy and after analysing the specimen, he dispatched his corps of reporters and artists to the head-quarters of the poison. He wanted everyone to know the truth about what was happening in those disgusting metal sheds. The milkmen started getting turned away. Angry mobs began to form outside distillery dairies and milk carts. Unfortunately, the distilleries were a powerful lobby group and successfully blocked any serious inquiry into the dairies and stymied calls for reform. Classic. But by 1862, thanks to Frank Leslie’s work, regulations finally came in banning the swill milk trade. Another 50 years and a slaughterhouse scandal after that, the Pure Food Act was signed and later on in the 1930’s, pasteurization became a standard procedure. No more formaldehyde, no more pus, no more manure. So, anyone thirsty? SOURCES: An historical, scientific, and practical essay on milk, as an article of human sustenance: with a consideration of the effects consequent upon the present unnatural methods of producing it for the supply of large cities, by Robert Hartley Dr. Hurty vs Embalmed Milk, by Haley Brinker Health benefits of Raw Milk on Australian Raw Milk Movement How we Poison Our Children, in the New York Times May 13 1858 The 19th-Century Fight Against Bacteria-Ridden Milk Preserved With Embalming Fluid, by Deborah Blum The 19th-Century Swill Milk Scandal That Poisoned Infants With Whiskey Runoff, by Tyler Moss The Dangers of Raw Milk: Unpasteurized Milk Can Pose a Serious Health Risk, by the US FDA The Surprisingly Intolerant History of Milk, by Daniel Fernandez The Swill is Gone, by Bee Wilson Toddler dies, four children seriously ill after drinking raw cow's milk, by Marissa Calligeros of The Age See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Humans have always been fascinated by the unexplained. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and, one of the most intriguing unknowns that has captured our imagination for centuries, the possibility of extraterrestrial life. UFO sightings, crop circles, close encounters with aliens and even abductions have been reported for decades. And until recently, the people making these claims were considered nutjobs. They’d watched too many X-files episodes and had gone bonkers. But then in 2016, Hillary Clinton went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and told us about UAP’s. Unexplained Aerial Phenomena. Apparently, UAP’s and their potential threat to national security is a topic that’s been discussed behind closed doors for decades. Obama dismissed it as a joke but Clinton pulled the cat out of the bag. Washington lobbyists Steve Bassett and John Podesta are advocating for the disclosure of government information on unexplained phenomena that could prove the existence of intelligent life outside Earth. This raises the question, what the heck has the government been hiding? Usually, they’re so transparent! And if the people charged with governing our nations know that UAP’s (who are we kidding…they’re UFO’s) are indeed a threat to national security, it’d be great to know what’s being done about it. We wouldn’t mind knowing if we have distant cousins on another planet or if ET was based on a true story. Perhaps the nutjobs we wrote off so cavalierly gave UFO’s a bad name. And because it became such a taboo topic, it’s prevented serious scientific study and rational discussion. But surely with technological advances and a bit more openmindedness, we’re at a point now where we’re willing to probe further into the unknown and investigate the few examples of unexplained aerial phenomena that exist. Things do seem to be changing. Under recent US Navy protocol, navy pilots and sailors will no longer be considered crazy for reporting UAPs. In fact, a recent survey of 62 astronomers found that over 4% of them reported seeing things they could not explain. And physicist, Enrico Fermi, argued that amongst the 300 billion stars in the galaxy, there could be thousands of intelligent civilisations in the universe. We’re not alone people. Hillary Clinton told us so. Perhaps the reason she didn’t get elected was because she promised to release information about Area 51, a secret hub where the US government stores classified information about aliens and UFO’s. Now if that’s not a killer Hollywood script, we don’t know what is. SOURCES: Live Science: Former Head of Pentagon's Secret UFO Program Has Some (Strange) Stories to Tell New York Times: Hillary Clinton Gives U.F.O. Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files CNN Politics: Clinton campaign chair: ‘The American people can handle the truth’ on UFOs The Conversation: Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study & The Conversation: Why is the Pentagon interested in UFOs? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lithium. Anyone who had a heartbeat in the 90s knows that Nirvana song backward. Speaking of, Rod’s claim to fame is meeting Kurt Cobain and the boys but that’s a story for another time. The lithium we speak of today is the light, flammable, silvery white metal found naturally in nearly all rocks. It rose to fame as the star ingredient in the first man-made nuclear reaction. But lithium is no one-hit-wonder. Lithium is also a medication that helps to stabilise the moods of millions of people with bipolar disorder. How the heck did anyone discover that? Did someone take the term “eat rocks” literally? Well, in the early 20th century, lithium was seen as a bit of a "cure-all". It was even in the original 7-Up recipe! But when it comes to using lithium to treat bipolar, the credit must go to Dr John Cade. Born in country Victoria in 1912, as a young boy, Cade actually lived in a number of asylums. He wasn’t a patient though. His father was a doctor who worked in the Mental Hygiene Department so the whole family lived together on campus. Every single day, he observed mentally ill patients and Cade eventually studied medicine and became a psychiatrist. However during World War II, while serving in Singapore as a surgeon, he became a prisoner of war for three and a half years. During this time, he obviously endured a brutal existence, but he also made some very interesting observations. See, up until that point, the standard wisdom was that serious mental illness was caused by a poor upbringing, bad morals and the like. Too much grunge music perhaps. But what Cade observed during those harrowing years in the POW camp, was that serious mental illness can be caused by biological changes. So upon returning to Australia, he got to work. Cade had a theory that mania and depression were caused by excess and deficiency of a naturally occurring substance in the body. The solution was of course… urine! Being the supportive woman she was, Cade’s wife, Jean, started accumulating jars. Buttloads of them. Cade convinced her that if his research came to nothing, they could use them for pickling. Sooo many pickles. And yes, she stored them in the fridge. Eww. Then, Cade got a bunch of guinea pigs and injected the urine into their abdominal cavities. Sadly, they all died. He thought perhaps the two toxic substances in urine, urea and uric acid might work in tandem to make the urine of manic patients more toxic. He just needed some way to convert urea into a substance that he could more easily manipulate. Enter lithium. Now, Cade needed to check if lithium was causing any confounds, so he injected the guinea pigs with a lithium carbonate solution. They didn’t die. In fact, they became docile and super chill. So he did what any dedicated scientist would do. He tested it on himself. In 1948, after not dying of lithium poisoning, Cade decided it was safe to give 10 of his patients the same treatment. One of his patients had been psychotic for more than 30 years and after two months of treatment, he walked out of the asylum back to his old job, perfectly sane. In fact, 5 out of the 10 people Dr Cade treated had improved enough to return to their homes and families. Nothing had been seen like it in mental health before. But what about side effects? Unfortunately, Cade was unaware that too much lithium is toxic and his pioneering patient died in 1950 due to lithium toxicity. Devastated, Cade abandoned his experiments with lithium, passing the chill pill over to psychiatrists Mogens Schou and Poul Baastrup to characterise its safety profile. Thanks to them all, this ubiquitous element, easily processed into medication and never patented by pharmaceutical companies, remains both cheap and invaluable as a treatment for troubling mental health diagnoses. In 1980, Dr Cade died with many honours, including medical units, fellowships, and awards being named after him. SOURCES: News.com.au: Finding Sanity: How an Australian doctor discovered the first drug to treat mental illness ABC: The history of lithium, and its remarkable impact on mood disorders ABC: Remembering John Cade, the Australian doctor who tamed bipolar disorder Live Science: What Is Lithium? Wikipedia: Lithium Nature: Lithium: the gripping history of a psychiatric success story PsychCentral: What Is Lithium-Induced Nephrogenic Diabetes Insipidus? Drugs.com: Lithium: 7 things you should know See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

19th century industrial revolution times meant brilliant machines, inventions and factories. Workers were leaving rural areas en masse to find work in the city. Bloody hard, low paid and dangerous work mind you. And not only was the work shitty, but there was literally shit everywhere. Pollution, human excrement. Even dead horses on the streets. But the worst work of all? Well, that was down on the docks where the ships came in. Every day, floods of seamen would wash in from foreign parts. A “release binge of seamen” one writer termed it; and with their vulgar tongues and unruly behaviour, straight to the pubs and brothels they’d go! Enter the religious, do-gooder busybodies, the reformers (picture Ned Flanders with a waistcoat and tophat). Knowing they couldn’t convince the seamen to come to church, they formed the American Seamen’s Friends Society and came up with the next best thing: Floating libraries! Administered by the seaman librarian every Sunday morning, the library (a red wooden crate filled with books) would be opened for the sailors to peruse and borrow. But could books really turn these rascally seamen into upright citizens? The theory of the Seamen’s Friends Society was that by reading elevating, high-minded literature, the sailors would come to abandon their drinking, rooting and swearing, and choose the godly life. Whilst at sea, seamen were a captive audience with low standards. They were either doing horrible, brutal, dirty work (ever peeled a whale?), or bored out of their brains with nothing to do. So prior to the floating libraries, seamen entertained themselves by rearranging the contents of a sea chest (Marie Kondo eat your heart out) or reading a year-old newspaper over and over and over again, including every word of every advertisement. So of course, the books couldn’t be any old books. Obviously, the seamen were completely void of all virtue, knowledge and self-control! They must only be allowed to read books that were carefully curated by the American Seamen’s Friends Society - meaning mostly Bibles, Bible dictionaries, volumes of sermons, books warning against infidelity and universalism, a little science and history, and because the Seamen’s Friends Society genuinely wanted the seamen to be happy, they threw in a few books that should be of interest to them, like almanacs and shipwrecks. Really? Bit of a dick move there. So did the books help? Well, as we said, the seamen were desperate for entertainment so they lapped them up. But some books were more popular than others and God forbid, anyone receive any product and/or service without being asked to “complete our quick survey”. The Seamen’s Friends Society collected data on what books the sailors enjoyed. It turns out they were less about God and shipwrecks and more about adventure, automobiles and engines. So long as the book was about things on the land and not on water, they were into it. And what of the Bibles that would lure these foul seamen into the kingdom of God? All the other books were dog-eared and had evidence of seamen all over them (smirk) but the Bibles? Barely touched. To the credit of these do-gooder reformers, they came to realise that instead of trying to shove religious texts down the sailor's throats, it was better to simply provide a little joy and recreation into their lonely lives at sea. Did the floating libraries help the seamen to stop swearing and commit their lives to Christian ways? Probably not. But boy did it give them something nice and wholesome to do. PREVIOUS EPISODE MENTIONED: Arctic Cold Case Solved: Who Was First To The North Pole? SOURCES: The New York Times’ CIRCULATING LIBRARIES OF THE SEA FOR NEARLY HALF A MILLION SEAMEN; An Elaborate System, in Vogue for More Than Fifty Years, by Which 3,000 Libraries Are Kept Afloat. New York Times. David M Hovde’s Sea Colportage: The Loan Library System of the American Seamen's Friend Society, 1859-1967, in Libraries and Culture See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You know how in sci-fi films, there’s always some freak accident in a biotech lab, leaving hundreds of people dead and authorities in a state of pandemonium? Take the highly praised anime short film, Stink Bomb, for example. A flu-ridden lab technician swallows an abandoned pill on his boss’s desk presuming (reasonably, right?) that it could only be flu medicine. Turns out it just so happens to be part of an experimental bioweapons program, causing his body to omit vapours that are lethal to everyone around him. The enigmatic movie ends with everyone dead. It’s worth the watch actually. So, turns out that Stink Bomb was actually based on a true story. Say WHAT? Riverside General Hospital, southern California, on Feb 19, 1994. At 8 am, ambulance drivers rushed 31-year-old Gloria Ramirez into trauma room 1. She presented with shallow and rapid breathing and her heart was beating way too fast, causing her blood pressure to take a nosedive. After a cocktail of drugs and respiratory assistance, nothing was working. When the hospital staff yanked off her t-shirt to get ready to defib, they observed an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body coupled with a fruity, garlicky odour. Hmmmm. They took some blood and that too had an interesting stench for different reasons. Not only that but upon closer inspection of the syringe, Gloria’s blood contained straw-coloured flecks. Okay, that doesn’t seem like it’s a good thing. Suddenly, the nurse who drew Gloria’s blood started feeling faint and like her face was burning. The respiratory therapist was unable to control her limbs. They started dropping like flies. The medical resident who had eyeballed the syringe started shaking in waves, having repeated apnea episodes. She actually ended up spending 2 weeks in intensive care, suffering from hepatitis, pancreatitis, and avascular necrosis, (a condition in which bone tissue is starved of blood and begins to die). Hectic. More and more staff started falling ill so the boss doctor, Humberto Ochoa, evacuated the emergency room into the parking lot. There, the fallen staff’s clothes were removed and sealed in bags in case they had been contaminated with some kind of poisonous gas. This is legit sci-fi film material. Now, while all the sick people were outside naked with burning faces and uncontrolled limbs, a skeleton crew stayed in the trauma room and worked to revive Gloria with multiple defib attempts. Sadly, she was declared dead at 8:50 and her body was isolated in another room. What the HELL was going on? Was it a gas leak? A mass hysteria event? Maybe the hospital was the site of a secret meth lab! Hey, meth was big business in Riverside County in the 90s. But these are all just theories. We need real science-based answers. Time to wheel out the computer-guided combined gas chromatograph spectrometer. (That’s an Adam West Batman episode right there). Incredibly, even after exhaustive toxicological studies and investigations by serious experts from at least two institutions, they couldn’t find anything that would have stink bombed the emergency department. So what the heck happened? Friends, it’s time to get real science nerdy. We’re talking David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson-level nerdy. Did you know just half a gram of dimethyl sulphate can kill a person in 10 minutes? Don’t ask how science knows that. Oh, and you know how sci-fi films usually have some crazy person with a whiteboard and red string trying to figure out what’s going on? Yeah, this story has that too (but in the form of a scrapbook). Previous episodes mentioned: A Million And One Uses For Sperm! The Dancing Plague of 1518! The Sexist Science Behind Animal Testing SOURCES: Discover Magazine: Analysis of a Toxic Death A possible chemical explanation for the events associated with the death of Gloria Ramirez at Riverside General Hospital Patrick M. Grant, Jeffrey S. Haas, Richard E. Whipple, Brian D. Andresen Forensic Science International 87 (1997) 219–237 IFL Science: The Death Of "The Toxic Lady" Remains An Unsolved Medical Case New York Times: Fumes at hospital baffles officials Straight Dope: What’s the story on the “toxic lady”? Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gloria_RamirezSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all love a good race. The competition, the rivalry, the winner revelling in their victory at the finish line. But some races don’t have a clear winner. In fact, some destinations aren’t all that clear either. In the early 1900s, the race to the North Pole was in full swing and there were two competing claims as to who got there first. The problem is, the North Pole is tricky to get to, it’s tricky to notice when you’re there and it’s also very tricky to confirm that you’ve been there in the first place. Oh, and it also doesn’t stay still. It’s a moving target with a promise of frostbite. Now, on September 2 1909, the front page of the New York Herald boasted that the North Pole was discovered by Dr Frederick A Cook, a lovely man, but also known to be wildly full of shit. It’s been shown that he clearly faked his claimed ascent of the highest mountain in North America. Okay mate. Five short days later, The New York Times declared that the first person to reach the North Pole was in fact one Robert Peary, a shall we say, less lovely, man whose one mission in life was to obtain fame. There was no one else more focused on Arctic exploration than Robert Peary. Heck, he’d dig up indigenous graves, steal remains and fake funerals to achieve his glory. And yes, he actually did that. Well, perhaps he wasn’t as pigheaded as it sounds. He DID have a faithful African American field assistant join him on his adventures. Or maybe that was because he knew he wouldn’t have to share his honours with a black man. Yeah, he was probably a bigot. So... who actually got to the North Pole first? Throughout history, there have been many attempts to reach Santa’s homeland. One keen explorer was supposedly murdered by his chief scientist along the way. Another got caught in pack ice and drifted aimlessly for almost 2 years. 2 whole years. Yikes. But Cook and Peary both lived to tell the tale. They even wrote about their journey’s in their top-secret diaries. Now Cook and Peary were by no means strangers. In fact, they started out as companions and voyagers together, until it became clear that Peary was a bit obsessed with getting all the glory. So they went their separate ways and they took wildly different approaches to their race to the North Pole. Cook was described as being part of a new wave of explorers. Taking a keen interest in the indigenous people he came across in the Arctic, he learned their dialects and adopted their diet. Walrus anyone? He left for the pole in February 1908 with a party of nine natives and 11 light sledges pulled by 103 dogs. His plan was to follow an untried but promising route. Peary, on the other hand, took a more imperialistic approach. Chasing fame at any cost, he cared for the local people's well-being, but only to the extent that it might be useful to him. In July 1908, Peary left on his voyage to the Pole with a very large party indeed, including over 40 Inuit men, women and children, 70 tonnes of whale meat, the meat and blubber of 50 walruses, tonnes of coal, and nearly 50 heavy sledges and 246 dogs. Now, both men claimed to reach the North Pole. But what happened on their return is where the story really gets interesting. See, along the arduous way home, Cook met an American Hunter named Harry Whitney who offered him a trip back on a boat that was coming for him at the end of the summer. But Cook thought it would be faster to sledge another 700 miles down to a Danish trading post and catch a ship from there. (We’d opt for the boat, but each to their own.) Given he was travelling light, Cook left all his heavy luggage in Whitney’s safe keeping, including 3 trunks of his very precious equipment and expedition records. Eventually, Cook reached the trading post where he wired the details of his successful mission to the New York Herald! Hooray! In a weird quirk of fate, the boat Whitney was waiting for was none other than Robert Peary’s ship, returning from his own exciting polar expedition. There was no way in hell Peary was going to transport the trunks filled with proof that Cook had gotten to the North Pole first! So, Whitney had no other choice but to stash the trunks somewhere safe. Somewhere on the rocks in northern Greenland should do it! When Peary heard that the newspapers were boasting Cook’s triumph, he was furious! As soon as he could, he sent news to The New York Times that he was in fact the first to reach the North Pole. The media was in a frenzy. They even put out polls (polls on the Pole?) for people to vote on the man who should get the glory. Most people were on team Cook, until Peary started his campaign, critiquing Cook’s lack of evidence (those darn missing trunks) and spreading the word about his dodgy mountain climbing claim (fair point). Meanwhile, Peary refused to show anyone his own diary. Was he hiding something? None of that seemed to matter because President Taft signed a bill recognising Peary as the first Arctic explorer to reach the North Pole. Well if the pr

In very intelligent and intricate ways, scientists can be a bit dumb sometimes. Imagine a golden retriever as a stand-in for Brad Pitt. They’re both mammals, they’re both beautiful, and they both eat food. We can’t possibly see anything wrong with this situation. Not too far from this absurd example is how the scientific community has thought about animal testing. Sure, mice and humans are both mammals, and both are beautiful (to their mother) but inside and out, there are some pretty big differences. Did you know mice can’t spew? Apparently, their diaphragms are a bit wimpy and their stomachs are too bulbous. If we were mice, we’d be offended! Anyhoo, that probably explains why vomiting didn’t crop up as a side effect during animal tests of drugs like Rolipram; a drug showing promising results in the fight against depression until human trials resulted in non-stop vomiting. Years of research and millions of dollars were literally flushed down the toilet because researchers ass-u-me’d that humans were the same as mice. Another thing mice can’t do is have a stroke. They’re robust little critters, aren’t they, what with their plaque-free blood vessels? Unfortunately, this meant 114 potential stroke therapies initially tested on animals failed in human trials. But that’s how it goes with science: 10% of the time you win, the other 90% you find nothing and keep scratching your head. This doesn’t explain, however, why scientific research is so goddamn sexist. Regardless of pronouns and gender identity, biologically speaking, males and females are different. Research from more recent years shows that even on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters. Let’s hear that again… “on a cellular and genetic level, biological sex matters”! And yet, many studies that we still reference for medical interventions today don’t take this into consideration. Since 1923, if not earlier, scientists have excluded female animals in trials, even when studying effects on issues that only affect women. The argument was “fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable”. But wait, what about the male mice who, when housed together, establish a dominance hierarchy boosting testosterone levels of the alphas to 5 times that of the betas? But that’s not hormonal, right? That’s just dudes being dudes. Clearly, science hasn’t removed itself from the patriarchy. So if sexism runs rampant in animal testing labs too, what are we going to do about it? Thankfully, major funders of scientific research including the US National Institutes of Health, which handles 80,000 grants a year, now have a requirement that the research they fund take into account sex as a biological variable (or at least have a very good reason why not). So, from genetically modified lab rats to simulations and AI, accompany us down the rabbit hole into some of the less well-publicised tales from the world of animals as proxy people, and join in a collective facepalm at the pervasiveness of sexism. Previous episodes mentioned: - Gain of Function Research and the Lab Leak Hypothesis! (& YouTube link) - What Do We Do With The Immortal Quadrillionaires? SOURCES: The Atlantic - Medicine has a rate problem (It’s stranger than you think) Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics - The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation Nature - Males still dominate animal studies The Guardian - Use of male mice skews drug research against women, study finds (by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent @hannahdev) CNN - Lab rats are overwhelmingly male, and that’s a problem (by Katie Hunt) NPR - Drugs That Work In Mice Often Fail When Tried In People The Conversation - Of mice and men: why animal trial results don’t always translate to humans European Animal Research Association - Animal research saves lives. So why do opponents say it is ineffective? Vox - Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything? Nature - 1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are some things we know not to do. Crossing the road without looking, not wearing a seatbelt…and looking at the sun. A fairly intrinsic lesson we all learned at some unidentifiable point in our lives. But some people throughout history have rallied against this fundamental human law. One of them is an orange quack who ruled America for a brief, nightmarish period of time. Another is an eyeball guy (an actual ophthalmologist) William Horatio Bates, born in 1860. But did this guy start out as a rule-breaking, sun-staring charlatan? It seems Master Bates had a fairly normal life until 1902 when he went missing for six weeks. He was found not on his home continent of North America but across the ocean in England, claiming no recollection of his former life. Later in his life, he went missing for eight years (EIGHT years!). This was back in the days when it was still possible to completely fall off the face of the Earth. After these curious episodes, Bates' life resumed a rhythm of somewhat normalcy, at least to the untrained eye (see what we did there?). But in his field of ophthalmology, where he had once been considered a luminary, Bates stepped off the deep end. This well-revered ophthalmologist developed a distinct hatred of glasses. That’s basically eye doctor blasphemy! He’s lucky a mob didn’t come to raid his house Simpsons style. Now, at this point in his career, Bates authored an entire book centred around his rejection of glasses. His mission was to cure people without them. And regardless of how noble of a mission this was, Bates had a couple of theories that, to be crystal clear, were absolute garbage. Our friend Bates was convinced that eyeball exercises such as palming (yes, that term makes us nervous too) could cure eyesight… mkay. And the final exercise he recommended for 20/20 vision, sans glasses? Oh yes, have a bit of a stare at the sun. Just stare right into the centre of that laser beam old boy, you’ll be fine. It’s like something out of an old-school Batman episode where the evil villain has finally captured Adam West. I mean, this solution is just as bad, if not worse, than other eye treatments that have been suggested across history. Ground up sapphires anyone? Some amniotic fluid perhaps? Even better, his theory asserted that if you went blind using his methods, it was all just a mental illusion. Couldn’t possibly be the giant laser beam you were staring into. It’s all in your head! So, what happened to Bates’ methods? Did he manage to seduce people with the promise of a return to 20/20 vision? And what actually happens to your eyeballs when you stare at the sun? Previous Episode mentioned: The History and Science of Raw Food! SOURCES: A unifying experience, The Guardian Dr W H Bates Dies, An Eye Specialist, New York Times 11 July 1931 Science Says Why We Can't Look at the Sun, Scientific American Staring at the Sun (U2 song), Wikipedia The cure of imperfect sight by treatment without glasses, by William H Bates The Mysterious Disappearance—and Strange Reappearance—of Dr. William Horatio Bates, Mentalfloss The optical theories of W H Bates, Journal of the American Medical Association 81:2 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Indiana Jones is a cool guy. An archaeologist, an adventurer who tore shit up, stumbled his way through tunnels and over invisible bridges to uncover priceless ancient artefacts. But that’s Hollywood. In real life, ancient discoveries happen in far less exciting ways…Or do they? The typical archaeological toolbox includes dental picks, trowels, brushes and measuring tapes. No archaeologist would blow an ancient city to smithereens. Right? And only in the movies would someone accidentally lean on a wall to unveil the world's oldest known library. Right? Incorrect. Both those things happened. And a lot of other cool shit too. Much like Indiana, Heinrich Schliemann had a passion for the ancient. Born in 1822, he grew up listening to his corrupt Lutheran pastor father telling the Homeric stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As a young boy, he believed he would be the one to not only prove the city of Troy was real, but to actually find it. Incredibly, he did find it, buried deep beneath the Turkish city of Hisarlik. Unfortunately, he had run out of patience after his lifelong search and decided to use dynamite, exploding and destroying the actual Troy of the actual story. So now we know where Achilles and Hector fought. But we also know we will never see it because Schliemann blew it up. What a guy. Another lost city founded by Alexander the Great was discovered by Charles Masson, an interesting character who was obsessed with finding ancient coins. But apparently, Alexander the Great doesn’t have much historical value because that site is now underneath Bagram Air Base. Yep, they covered it in concrete. Where does modern science come into the picture? Uncovering history can’t all be disasters and accidents! Well, let’s head to Greece to the ancient city of Helike where disaster struck (earthquake lights might have been involved. Yes earthquake lights are a thing). Due to soil liquefaction, this thriving city got swallowed, sinking deep beneath the ground. Thanks to technology, in 1994, a magnetometer survey of an inland lagoon revealed the outlines of a buried building. Once the site was excavated (without dynamite), a large Roman building with standing walls was found. Cobblestones, clay roof tiles, pottery, legit old stuff. So if you’re on the hunt for a lost city, when you find it, please, for the love of Pharaoh, don’t blow it up. Maybe ask the locals. They might be able to lead you in the right direction - to Atlantis perhaps! And what the hell do chickens have to do with discovering lost cities? Tune in for all this and much much more. SOURCES: 5 Ancient Lost Cities That Were Rediscovered, the Collector Derinkuyu: Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man’s basement, on Big Think GlobalXplorer° How to Find a Lost City, by Edmund Richardson, on The History Reader The Life of Heinrich Schliemann, the Discoverer of Troy, in Greek Reporter Mr Masson and the lost cities: a Victorian journey to the edges of remembrance, in Classical Receptions Journal Turkey's underground city of 20,000 people, BBC Image credits Earthquake lights Derinkuyu See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For centuries, religious relics have been the only means by which devout followers could interact with the divine. Let us journey into some of the gross holy relics. The bones of saints, the milk of the virgin Mary, perhaps a little finger of St Thomas. St Francis Xavier’s toes were a big hit too. This saint died of exhaustion in 1552 after converting communities across Asia and leaving myriad churches in his wake. One devoted woman visiting his corpse bent to kiss his foot, bit off his toe and took it back to Portugal to display it in her own chapel. Cuz that’s normal. Even the nipples of a pious Hungarian princess became the subject of pilgrimages. Elizabeth of Thuringia devoted her life to helping the poor and died all too young at the hands of her brutal caretaker. It seems a tragic death makes one even more holy because mobs of Catholics couldn’t get enough of her. Just one strand of hair, a fingernail, perhaps a nibble of a nipple? But why stop at blood, toes and nipples? What about something even more precious? Like Jesus Christ’s foreskin. The holy prepuce. The divine turtleneck. Now that’s a relic that would put a ring around your head. Legend has it that Jesus’ foreskin has been responsible for perfumed mists, freak storms and the rings of Saturn. One account suggested that rubbing it upon the eyelids of the blind could make them see. So, foresight? Now, JC’s circumcision was mentioned in the Bible and it’s depicted in numerous famous paintings, but no one talked about what happened to the offcuts. Many churches throughout Europe have claimed to be in ownership of the holy foreskin… but where is it really? Like art travelling between galleries, early reports trace JC’s tip from a Byzantine Empress to King Charlemagne to Pope Leo III. They say it went from Rome to England and back to Rome again, found in Calcata in 1557. It was hidden in the cell of a captured German soldier who flogged it during the sacking of Rome. So sneaky. By the way, we know this particular foreskin actually belonged to JC himself because Saint Bridget of Sweden had a vision of the Virgin Mary in the late fourteenth century who told her it was. Solid evidence. Now, as time moved forward, science became more popular and the church became a tad self-conscious about JC’s private parts. Under pressure to banish Catholic practices that could be seen as culturally backward, the Vatican issued a decree in 1900 threatening ex-communication to anyone who wrote about the holy foreskin. Harsh but fair. But then in the 1960s, a bunch of hippies made a big deal about it again. The turtleneck was back in fashion! Calcata’s local priest, Father Dario Magnoni took to storing the holy bangle in a box under his bed or in the back of his wardrobe. Hmmm. But then, before the Feast of the Holy Circumcision in 1983 (it was a kinda big deal back then), Father Magnoni discovered it was GONE. No one wanted to talk about it. People in the village were upset. Rumours were rampant. Did the Vatican steal Jesus’ foreskin so people would shut up about the Saviour’s penis? What TF happened to the holy turtleneck? SOURCES: The World’s Grossest Catholic Relics https://historycollection.com/worlds-grossest-catholic-relics/16/ NOTE – the pictures Rod showed Will came from here The Holy Foreskin: Where is the Last Piece of the Body of Christ? https://www.historicmysteries.com/holy-foreskin/ Whatever Happened To Jesus Christ's Foreskin? https://www.wired.com/2006/12/whatever-happen/ How Jesus' foreskin became one of Christianity's most-coveted relics — and then disappeared https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-jesus-foreskin-became-one-of-christianity-s-most-coveted-relics-and-then-disappeared-1.6002421 The Holy Prepuce: A Lesser Known Relic of Jesus Christ https://ucatholic.com/blog/the-holy-prepuce-a-lesser-known-relic-of-jesus-christ/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of the best things in life were never meant to be. Just think of your favourite food, breed of dog or childhood toy - some of these were the result of accidents and batshit crazy experiments. The good old fashioned slinky was accidental, superficially bland and, yes, a little bit dangerous. Let’s go back to one particularly scintillating afternoon in the office of Richard James, a mechanical engineer working on his device to monitor horsepower. Boring, right? Until he knocked over a spring! Fascinated by what happened next - a perfect walking motion down a stack of books - Richard James knew he was onto something. Eureka! The OG slinky. Now, a lot of work goes into turning an engineer’s spring into a beloved toy. The metal gauge, the length - every aspect of this toy was carefully considered in the precise manner that only an engineer’s mind could perform. And as for the name, well that took particular dedication from Richard’s wife, Betty. She nailed it. But would anyone be interested in this toy? Of course, kids are the harshest toy critics, so clever Richard enlisted help from the local neighbourhood kids for one vital step in Slinky success - product testing. Richard’s next task was to get the toy stores to stock his new, strangely simple toy. After much haranguing, Richard got the Slinky into just one store in Philadelphia and came up with a neat in-store marketing schtick. And then he sold a tonne of Slinkies and became a millionaire? Well, not quite. Richard and Betty didn’t quite walk away with the spring in their step you’d imagine. Evangelical Christian sects and slumping sales were just some of the challenges they faced. As for the sales, well that didn’t quite go how we’d all expect, given that the Slinky is still around today. Like all toys, the simple Slinky has its fair share of dangers. Can toys be murderous? And will ChatGPT reveal any un-wholesome truths about the Slinky? SOURCES: Art of Play: The History of the Slinky Encyclopedia.com: James, Betty & James, Richard Wikipedia: Richard T. James, Betty James, Slinky Today I Found Out: THE SLINKY WAS ORIGINALLY INTENDED TO BE USED AS A TENSION SPRING IN A BATTLESHIP ENGINE HORSEPOWER METER Smithsonian Magazine: The Accidental Invention of the Slinky New York Times: Betty James, Who Named the Slinky Toy, Is Dead at 90 ABC Eye Witness News: Woman uses Slinky to keep squirrels from bird feeder CBS News: Slinky Trivia The Straight Dope: Did the inventor of the Slinky join a cult in Bolivia? LinkedIn: The Somewhat Shocking Story of the Slinky by Richard Sharp The Atlantic: The Story of the Slinky. How one klutzy move launched a toy empire List25.com: 25 Most Dangerous Kids’ Toys Ever Made See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The whole of science is stuffed full of delicious stories, and we really want to tell you every damn one of them. But we know our little human brains can’t absorb too much at one time. So today we’re introducing our new line of Wholesome SnacksTM, where we bring you a selection of new and tasty tales that have been consumed, concentrated and reconstituted just for you. Get your bib out because, in today’s snack pack, we’ve got some real doozies for you. Our first short story starts with the first map of an entire insect brain - specifically, the brain of a fruit fly larvae. Scientists recently created the most advanced brain map to date, slicing the baby fruit fly brain into thousands of individual tissue samples and mapping connections neuron by neuron. It took….quite a while. The findings were pretty interesting and unexpected - here’s to hoping we see scientists move on to even more exciting species in the near future. You’re next, mice! So, have you ever thought about how you might keep warm in your grave during winter? Well High Gate Cemetery, Britain’s most famous resting place, is apparently considering heated graves to protect stonework in extreme weather. Sudden changes in temperature can result in unacceptable damage, such as the cracked tiles on Julius Beer’s tomb. God forbid the mausoleums look messy - we’ve got celebrities in here, people! Now on to medical data. Would a smart toilet leak your private info? According to Stanford University, there’s a version of a smart toilet in the lab that can look up your biomarkers and monitor signs of disease. But there are ethical and legal considerations to this, like the possibility of your data transmitted online being hacked. So someone might discover your urine flow is a bit light, or your potassium is low and you need to eat more bananas. Who cares? But information such as the toilet user being pregnant or having cancer getting leaked? Not ideal. Today in space news - Rolls Royce has secured funds to research how micro nuclear reactor technology might power a moon base. It’s exciting to see this research-backed as we prepare to send humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But mostly we’re interested to see these reactors decked out with all the Rolls Royce trimmings - leather lining, cup holders, perhaps a control panel in mahogany and if they’re really lucky they’ll get a coveted sneaky RR umbrella? Still in space - the puffy moon suits worn by the Apollo astronauts half a century ago are no longer space couture, so NASA has unveiled a new spacesuit design for the return to the moon. While they haven’t always had a great record for addressing their problems with sexism (remember the tampon fiasco in the 1980s?), NASA’s new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit is more flexible and actually designed to fit both men and women. It also looks pretty cool and we have the picture to prove it. And finally in historic achievement news, researchers at the University of Rochester have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications. In other words, you don't have to super chill it, squish it or keep it in the super fridge. Superconductivity can give us more efficient electronics and better medical imaging. Or even better - levitating high-speed trains. You’re gonna love these weird and wonderful news bites from around the globe - so wrap your ears around these morsels and dig in!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s simple. We work too much. There’s evidence that shows we work too much and it’s not a fun time for anyone. So what would a world with shortened work hours and no loss in pay look like? Pretty damn good. You’d be a fool to disagree. The weekend is a sacred thing. We live for it, we get our rest from it, but the two-day weekend as we know it has only been around for about a hundred years. The history of the work cycle across the globe is actually quite varied and at times, it gets pretty wacky. Pretend for a moment you’re back in Ancient Roman times and the days of the ‘nundinae’. You get one day off school a week and it’s market day. You’re only allowed to set up shop or for a real treat, you could go to the market and spend your coin. There’s also church, if you’re lucky. Not much of a day of rest, but it could be worse. Then there’s England in the 17th century, where we see a glimmer of the beginnings of the two-day weekend. Along with Sunday, workers sneaked Monday off (they called it ‘Saint Monday’), to go to church and worship. And by ‘go to church’ and ‘worship’ we mean, ‘go to the pub and get pissed’. Unsurprisingly, workers liked this. Bosses, not so much. Goodbye, Saint Monday. You’ve been fun. None of this really sounds ideal but don’t worry - it gets worse. Fast forward to 1929 and the Soviet Union, where Yuri Larin, economist and politician with a little too much imagination (to put it politely) decided it would be great to abolish weekends altogether. This aimed to both solve the current post-revolution economic problem and help to crush the power of religion. Fun! Thankfully, this only lasted a couple of years and workers returned to having their one day of rest per week. While work cycles still vary across different cultures, the two-day weekend idea that was first instituted by an American cotton mill in 1908 has stuck. But can working conditions become even better for us as time goes on? We know that 2023 is not where history ends, and there might be hope for us yet. Over the last five years, a not-for-profit community called 4 Day Week Global have organised a series of pilot studies around the world to trial a four-day workweek. We swoon at the thought. There are varied ways that companies are rolling out the shortened work hours strategy, but the good news is that they’ve seen increased productivity and a huge boost in general well-being amongst workers across the board. Is it realistic to run the workforce this way? Can we still generate profit within a shortened week? Could this really be the way of the future?! We’ll let the stats speak for themselves. PRIOR EPISODES MENTIONED: The Soviet Space Tractor! Karoshi Means Worked To Death (no exclamation mark) Dozenalism! How To Sabotage Your Workplace with OG Spy William Joseph Donovan SOURCES: A Failed Soviet Experiment Offers A Warning To Today’s Burnout Generation, in AOGA Eye on Design Four-Day Work Weeks: Current Research and Practice, by Rex L Facer II and Lori L Wadsworth, in Connecticut Law Review Soviet Experience with Shortening the Workweek, by David W Bronson in the ILR Review Who invented the weekend? BBC Bitesize Working Hours, by Charlie Giattino, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, on Our World in Data See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Let’s go back to the 1960s. A time of Richard Nixon, moon obsession, hippies, the Vietnam war and… no ethics committees. Born in Oklahoma in 1930, Robert Allan Humphreys was a man of many disguises. Ordained an Episcopalian priest in 1955, Humphreys changed his name to Laud after William Laud, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury (he was very holy). Humphreys followed the traditional 1960s path…got married, got kicked out of the church and started a PhD in sociology focussing on male-to-male sex in the St Louis area public restrooms. Then he destroyed a picture of Nixon and got sent to jail for 3 months where he was offered an academic position (naturally!). This just got a little more interesting. In the days of keeping up appearances and things being illegal which definitely should NOT be illegal, there was more homosexual activity happening in public restrooms (otherwise known as “tearooms”) than anyone cared to hear about. But Humphreys was determined to understand exactly what was going on, who was doing what, and why. He wanted up close and personal details. Now, being a professional and someone sincerely dedicated to the betterment of humanity, Humphreys began conducting some serious research. This included going undercover as a “watch queen”, gathering data on the who, what and when and eventually gaining the confidence of some of the men he observed. 12 months later, Humphreys pops on a disguise and rocks up to the private homes of a bunch of his original “subjects” claiming to be a health service interviewer, interviewing them about their marital status, race, job and so on. Oh, did we mention he found them by sneaking a peek at their licence plates outside the tearooms and asked his police buddy to run the addresses? Minor detail. Could Humphreys have gone about his research in a more honest and less invasive manner? Yes. Did Humphrey’s findings have the potential to threaten the social standings of the men whose extremely personal information he collected without consent? Absolutely. But, although Humphreys may not have had the most above-board ethical approach, he has since proven to help move humanity in the right direction. Following his investigation into the tearooms, Humphrey’s publications helped legitimise American gay and lesbian studies within sociology and challenged the notion of homosexuality as deviance. It also led to fewer men being arrested for having consensual sex. Pretty good, no? But the question on everyone’s lips is, does the end justify the means? PRIOR EPISODES MENTIONED: Why Are the Proud Boys So Obsessed With (Not) Wanking? Isaac Newton Coin Detective SOURCES: Sociology Professor accused of beating student NY Times June 10, 1968 https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/06/10/77178200.html?pageNumber=25 OBITUARY Robert Allan Humphreys; Priest, Author L.A. TIMES ARCHIVES AUG. 26, 1988 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-26-mn-797-story.html Humphreys, Laud (1930-1988) by Stephen O. Murray http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/humphreys_l_S.pdf Biography - Source: Stephen O. Murray, "Humphreys, Laud (1930-1988)," An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture, http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/humphreys_l.html, last accessed June 20, 2007. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt187025pr/entire_text/ Laud Humphreys and the Tearoom Sex Study https://drjkoch.org/Intro/Readings/Humphreys.htm Laud Humphreys and the Tearoom Sex Study - Dr. Joan Sieber, Visiting Research Scholar, The Kennedy Institute, 1977-78, and Professor of Psychology, California State University, Hayward https://drjkoch.org/Intro/Readings/Humphreys.htm Ethics I metal health research case study: The Tearoom Trade Study James M. DuBois https://sites.google.com/a/narrativebioethics.com/emhr/contact/the-tearoom-trade-study-1 Laud Humphreys and Research Ethics Babbie, Earl. The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy; Bingley Vol. 24, Iss. 3-5, (2004): 12-19. DOI:10.1108/01443330410790849 Editorial Introduction: Moving Beyond the Controversy: Remembering the Many Contributions of Laud Humphreys to Sociology and the Study of Sexuality Schacht, Steven P. The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy; Bingley Vol. 24, Iss. 3-5, (2004): 3. America’s Toe-Tapping Menace - By Laura M. Mac Donald Sept. 2, 2007 https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/opinion/02macdonald.html Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places RA ‘Laud’ Humphreys (1970)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alfred Ely Beach was a good and decent man. Born in 1826 in Springfield Massachusetts, Alfred loved his family, he loved the opera and he loved inventing. In fact, he invented the world’s first practical typewriter. He was legit. Hailing from a rich family in the newspaper business, Alfred made his way to New York where he learned the family trade. Heading up Scientific American Magazine, turning it into one of the most successful, powerful, and influential weeklies of its kind, Beach rubbed shoulders with the greats. Samuel F. B. Morse (inventor of Morse code), R. J. Gatling (inventor of the machine gun) and Thomas Edison himself called Beach friend. New York inventor life in the mechanical age was riveting! But there was one problem. The traffic… was horrendous. The hustle and bustle of Manhattan had become unbearable. So Beach was determined to find a solution. Eureka... A New York Pneumatic Subway! Beach had the brains, the money and the drive to make his idea work. Soon, all New Yorkers would travel via an underground tube in lavish style, sucked or blown to their destination of choice. No more arduous commutes. No more collisions with horse poo, rickety carts and polluted air. But there was just one person standing in Beach’s way: Boss Tweed, Mr Corruption himself. William Magar Tweed was the worst of the worst. Controlling the Democratic political machines of both city and state, Tweed had a monopoly on everything. He held everyone in the palm of his hand and nothing went under his nose without him getting a pretty penny from it. Everyone was afraid to do business with Boss Tweed. And no one ever stood up to him, except our good and decent inventor, Alfred Beach. Knowing Tweed would never grant permission for him to build his magnificent pneumatic subway, Beach decided to play Tweed at his own game. Applying for a building permit for an underground postal tube, Beach and his team dug in secret for 58 nights. But this was no postal tube. After 2 years, spending the equivalent of $7m of his own money, Beach had built a full-blown, high-class New York Pneumatic Subway. So where is it today? What happened to this magnificent invention? Was there a subway brawl between Alfred Beach and Boss Tweed? SOURCES: American Heritage - Alfred Ely Beach And His Wonderful Pneumatic Underground Railway New York Times - The Broadway Tunnel Damn Interesting - The Remarkable Pneumatic People-Mover Scientific American - Scientific American’s owner built the first New York Subway IMAGE CREDITS New York Times images from The New York Times, 27 Feb 1870 Other images from the Illustrated Description of the Broadway Pneumatic Underground Railway PRIOR EPISODES MENTIONED: Thou Art The Man! (Or, The Great Moon Hoax) YouTube: https://youtu.be/yyEbU7y7vA8 OmnyFM: https://omny.fm/shows/the-wholesome-show/thou-art-the-man-or-the-great-moon-hoax See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How far would you go to get to the truth, or perhaps more pertinently, to the bottom of things? William Beaumont was one dedicated scientist. Some might say ethically… ambiguous, but hey, he was born in 1785, so, old school. Later becoming known as the Father of Gastric Physiology, Beaumont did whatever he had to do in order to understand the juicy details of the digestive system. But did he go too far? Although not medically trained in the traditional sense, Beaumont began his career as an apprentice with a doctor. Recognised as a judicious and safe practitioner in the different applications of the medical profession, his dedication to understanding the anatomy of the human body prompted Beaumont to keep a journal describing daily events and the symptoms and treatments of patients. He also kept a very detailed journal of the 10 years of experiments he did on a poor old soul named Alexis Bidagan, otherwise known as St. Martin. St. Martin was a young Canadian man, horrifically shot in the stomach at close range, leaving him half-dead with a gaping hole in his stomach. Luckily for St. Martin (or perhaps unluckily?) Beaumont was the man at the scene. No one thought he’d live more than 36 hours, but St Martin carried on an entire year thanks to a few handy poultices and the attentive care of Beaumont. And then he got better. Kinda… St Martin didn’t really get back to normal. In fact, the hole in his stomach never quite closed up, leaving him with what can only be described as another digestive hole. Or if you’re Beaumont, an incredible opportunity to understand the digestive system. So the terribly “kind” Beaumont took St Martin on as his very own chore boy and thus began the experiments. 10 years of prodding, poking and shoving meats, cabbage and more into a hole that no one should have. There was nothing Beaumont wouldn’t do… or taste for that matter.. to get to the bottom of the digestive system. SOURCES: Science History Institute: Probing the Mysteries of Human Digestion Smithsonian Magazine: This Man’s Gunshot Wound Gave Scientists a Window Into Digestion Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery: A DEBT TO ALEXIS: THE BEAUMONT-ST MARTIN STORY Wikipedia: William Beaumont Encyclopedia of World Biography: William Beaumont Biography My North: The Gruesome Medical Breakthrough of Dr. William Beaumont on Mackinac Island Guinea Pig Zero: Alexis St. Martin (1794-1880): The Intrepid Guinea Pig of the Great Lakes PODCASTS MENTIONED: Radiolab Sawbones The Dollop See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles Vance Millar was the greatest troll ever. Born in Aylmer, Ontario in 1854, Charles was a fan of practical jokes. Some might have described him as a cantankerous man, capricious and out to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. Extremely intelligent, and top of his class in law school, Charles built a silly amount of wealth by investing in companies and real estate. Then he bought some racehorses as wealthy men do. But he was also an ass. With no love, no living relatives and a fortune worth 5 million in today’s money, Millar collapsed dead on the evening of Halloween in 1926. So who got all his money? Soon after his death, articles started appearing in newspapers about the curious nature of Millar’s will. Some interesting clauses were found that ended up shaking the entire city and pissing a bunch of people off. Millar’s money was to go to the mother who gave birth to the greatest number of children in the ten years after his death. And so the race began. Women went wild! The government tried to step in, issuing a bill to escheat the estate and nick all the cash but that couldn’t stop the women. They talked emphatically and persistently until the town seethed with indignation, eventually turning over the government’s rule. Tune in to hear about some of the families who were contenders for the Millar’s loot. Perhaps not so coincidentally, contraception was legalised in Canada in 1969. References Bearing the Burden: The Great Toronto Stork Derby 1926 - 1938, Masters Dissertation by Elizabeth Marjorie Wilton at Dalhousie University Comstock Act of 1873, at The First Amendment Encyclopedia Ghost Road: and Other Forgotten Stories of Windsor, by Marty Gervais How A Dead Millionaire Convinced Dozens Of Women To Have As Many Babies As Possible, by David Goldenberg on FiveThirtyEight It’s a long story: The history of birth control in Canada The Toronto 'Stork Derby' Baby Race, by Barbara Mikkelson on Snopes The Will of a Troll, by Five Guys FactsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Is your workplace overrun with unqualified managers, red tape and bureaucracy? Are you asked to sit in on arduous meetings with no real consequence when you’ve got deadlines coming out of your ears? Maybe that’s just office politics. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a deliberate ploy against you, decades-long in the making with deep roots in espionage and sabotage. Welcome, friends, to the world of citizen saboteurs. It all dates back to 1883 to the father of American intelligence, William Joseph Donovan. “Wild Bill” they called him and oh was he wild. After studying military strategy and combat tactics, Donovan formed his own troop known as the Silk Stocking Boys (you had to be there). He chased down Mexican bandits and rallied men to commit feats of bravery - sometimes under orders, sometimes off his own bat. With a bullet in his knee, Donovan lead his men through German fire, refusing to turn back when even the American tanks were retreating. A heavily decorated war hero, Wild Bill was a badass. But, not everything he did was obvious to the untrained eye. Working for a private secret organisation, Donovan started gathering intelligence on the developments throughout Europe leading up to World War 2. This attracted the attention of MI6, and that’s when Wild Bill started playing with the elites - Churchill, Roosevelt, movie stars and aristocrats - they all loved him. Heading up the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, Donovan was instrumental in a colossal number of acts of sabotage. Eventually, he got his people to build a manual centred around the idea that sabotage is a game that anyone can play. You don’t need guns, bombs and aeroplanes. Sometimes all you need is to be annoying. With instructions for managers and workers alike, Donovan’s book was filled with genius ideas to piss your enemy off - just enough to discombobulate them, but not get yourself caught. I’ll be damned. We’re under attack. SOURCES: Vanity Fair - Spymaster General: The adventures of Wild Bill Donovan and the “Oh So Social” O.S.S. Simple Sabotage - The Simple Sabotage Field Manual - Strategic Services Field Manual No.3 (1944) Central Intelligence Agency - The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency Britannica - William J. Donovan - United States diplomat and general Fandom - William J. Donovan Support sources: The Business Insider - The 16 best ways to sabotage your organization's productivity, from a CIA manual published in 1944 Corporate Rebels - Advice From The CIA: How To Sabotage Your Workplace Wikipedia - William J. Donovan National Park Service - William J. Donovan Irish America Magazine - “Wild Bill” Donovan: Irish-American War Hero and Superspy See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're separating the lupine from the canine from the vulpine. Or rather, how did wolves turn into dogs and why don’t foxes fit in? The Soviet Union in the 1930s was not a great place to be. And while we wouldn’t ever say they suffered the most, one group who experienced what might be called ‘interesting’ challenges were geneticists. You see at the time, genetic, biological and agricultural research was dominated by a bloke by the name of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. And he had some… interesting theories. One in particular was that you could educate plants to turn into other plants. Educate the rye into wheat. You know the trick. Agricultural alchemy. Ok, that’s crackpot. But these views (Lysenkoism) ended up the only acceptable theory in the Soviet Union at the time. Genetics was officially declared “a bourgeois pseudoscience”. In fact some geneticists - including rising star of genetics Nikolai Belyaev - went missing in the night, never to be seen again. Just for his science. But Nikolai’s brother Dmitry Belyaev wanted to fight back. So at the age of 20 he launched a secret quest in the middle of the Stalinist Soviet Union to repudiate Lysenko, keep the genetic flame burning for his brother - and for the sake of actual science of genetics and the non-actual science of cuteness, domesticate the fox! Gaining work as a lab technician Dmitry carried out breeding programs to breed the softest fox fur imaginable, and to answer deeper questions of domestication. Why had wolves turned into dogs but foxes remained wild? What brought about cuteness, and strange patches and colourings? And so, framing his experiment as an effort to improve the production of furs he launched a study that still continues today. What happens when you try to domesticate a fox? And, perhaps the most important question science has posed - can you manufacture cuteness? Sources: How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut The Gulag Archipelago Dmitry BelyaevSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth. But... how did we come to know that? It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case. A study in Sweden in the 1930’s found that even 3 year old children had cavities in 83% of their teeth. That’s bad. That’s real bad. See, the Swedes love their sweets. They even have a special term for Saturday Candy! With the knowledge we have today, the connection between candy consumption and cavities is blatantly obvious. But back then, they were still trying to figure out why people had black teeth… or no teeth at all. In fact during the World Wars, toothlessness was so prevalent in the United States that the military restricted recruits to men who had six teeth intact. As long as you had six teeth, you were good to go. But what was to be done? At that point, dentists were divided on the cause of dental decay. Was it due to an underlying disease? Was it due to overall diet? Or… was it candy? (Thankfully people had figured out by then that tooth worms weren’t to blame). So, The National Board of Sweden decided to undertake a long term nutritional study to determine the root cause of dental cavities once and for all. Aptly named the Vipeholm Hospital sugar experiments! They did in fact determine the cause (yes, it’s sugar), but the way they went about it was, well… not so ethical. Sources The New Yorker - How to eat candy like a Swedish person History of Dentistry - History of Dental Caries and Cariology CNN Health - The Swedish cavity experiments: How dentists rotted the teeth of the mentally handicapped to study candy’s effect Atlas Obscura - An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation Wikipedia - Vipeholm experiments See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we're re-living the horrors of Easter Island. Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (on its longest side), and as close as you can get to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. So you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it. But of course, you have. You’ve heard of Easter Island - or Rapa Nui, as it is known to locals and should be known to everyone - because soon after it was settled by intrepid Polynesian explorers around the 12th century, the new inhabitants took up a fascinating cultural practice of carving and erecting thousands of Moai, or giant stone heads, along the circumference of the island. They brought the inhabitants spiritual protection and later, pop culture fame. But you’ve probably also heard of Easter Island because sometime after the locals began erecting these thousands of Moai, the population - and culture - of the island collapsed. From a fertile paradise with perhaps ten thousand happy, farming, statue-building inhabitants, by the 20th century, there were barely a few hundred islanders, and the island itself was an arid relic of what once was. Archaeological expeditions described it as an exhausted terrain. The Moai were abandoned. But what was to blame for such destruction? The leading theory has been that the people of Rapa Nui over-exploited their own resources, leading to civil war, mass stone head tipping and ruin. This makes Easter Island a poster child for human folly and the dangers of climate change. But is this theory right? Or is the actual story perhaps more prosaic than that? What other factors (*ahem* racism) could possibly be (*cough* genocide) at play here (*mumbles* lies about cannibalism to justify Christian-ising the place)? Join Dr’s Will and Rod as they get to the bottom of the destruction of the forgotten people of Rapa Nui. Sources Benny Peiser’s ‘From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui’. DiNapoli, Crema, Lipo, Rieth and Hunt’s ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of radiocarbon and paleoenvironmental record shows population resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’ in Nature Communications BingUNews: ‘Resilience, not collapse: What the Easter Island myth gets wrong’ Princeton: ‘Jacob Roggeveen, 1659–1729’ Easter Island Travel: ‘Ship logs of 1722 voyage of Jacob Roggeveen’ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our soft, human brains have been bested by 2022 so we are taking a quick break over the Christmas period and will be back assaulting your senses in Jan 2023. But because we don't want your ears to go unentertained, we're digging back into the archives for eps that have made us squirm, think or vomit (or hopefully, all three!). Today, we try and understand why oh why people drink their own urine. Ok... to people who don't do it, it's weird and gross and wrong. But to people who do do it, it's basically the golden fountain of youth. We have been fascinated with our own urine for a while now (humans that is, not the two of us). Back in medieval times, urine was considered to be a crucial diagnostic tool. Using a urine wheel, these medieval folks would diagnose disease based on the colour, smell, and taste (yes, taste) of a person's wee. Presumably by the time the colour got to ‘black as very dark horn’ the prognosis was not excellent. This practice morphed into more urine-related fun times, specifically uromancy - a form of divination by studying urine. AKA Piss Prophets. And then we come to urophagia. The weird gross quack medicine that is drinking your own urine! Urine was used in several ancient cultures for various health, healing and cosmetic purposes…and still is today. Coen van der Kroon is a present-day advocate and has written an entire book researching both the history and present-day uses of urine. The book is very aptly called The Golden Fountain. You’ll be relieved to know that van der Kroon tackles his subject with sensitivity and conviction. The book is not only a comprehensive history of urine use but a user-friendly guide to urine’s practical application. The health benefits and life-enhancing properties he (and his devotees) claim are numerous. Revitalised energy, a cure for depression, immune system boosting… Why on earth have we not caught onto this earlier? You may not have ever wanted to know about this practice, but your intrepid explorers at The Wholesome Show have done the hard yards for you today - so sit back, pour yourself a glass of something delicious, and enjoy! Sources Consciousness and Cognition: The inhibitory spillover effect: Controlling the bladder makes better liars health: Why You're a Better Liar When You Have to Pee Science Alert: These Urine-Fuelled Socks Generate Enough Power to Transmit Wireless Signals American Journal of Nephrology: The medicinal use of urine 22 words: 20 things to do with Urine besides flushing it Buzzfeed: 31 Things You Should Definitely Know About Pee Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris: Piss Prophets and the Wheel of Urine The Yoga Institute: Coen van der Kroon The Golden Fountain - Coen can der Kroon BBC: Please can everyone stop drinking their own urine?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work. So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly? At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone. But Lilly wasn't just anyone. See, at 16 he had a pretty profound question: whether the mind could render itself sufficiently objective to study itself. Woah. It became his life's work trying to answer that question. Where it took him may surprise you. Early in Lilly’s career, it led him to become the first scientist to locate the pain and pleasure centres in the brain. And the first to... artificially stimulate them. But, you don’t study techniques for stimulating pain and pleasure in the brain without the FBI, the CIA, Air Force Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, and the State Department all becoming interested. So when Lilly realised that furthering this research meant the weaponisation of it, he abandoned the research and found another way to answer his question. Flipping the script, Lilly decided that sensory deprivation might be a pathway to understanding the mind. His quest to be cut off from sight, sound, temperature and gravity led him to invent the first-ever isolation tank. Not only was it the most relaxing thing he had ever been in, his time in the quiet, wet darkness led him to find “other things”. He experienced presences, both known and unknown. He eventually began to see through to another reality. At this point in his career, after guidance from some alien beings and a chance encounter with the gargantuan brain of a pilot whale, Lilly’s secret mission to study the human mind turned to the study of bottlenose dolphins. Lilly was determined to bring humans and dolphins into close proximity, so they could learn from each other and humans could teach the dolphins English. This work led him to believe that dolphins deserved a seat at the United Nations, and the creation of the little-known Order of the Dolphin. But did Lilly actually manage to talk to animals? And did he ever actually answer that driving question - can we understand our own mind? Sources Bruce Clarke’s John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds Gerard A Houghton: John Lilly Obituary Alex Leyman’s John C. Lilly: The Mad Scientist Who Gave LSD to Dolphins John C Lilly’s Dolphins' Complex Communication John C Lilly’s Autobiography The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography [described by the New Age Journal as “at times naive and frustrating”] John C Lilly / Ecco - Dolphin Voice, uploaded to Youtube by musick2138 Christopher Riley’s The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa funded project that went wrong. Maria Temming and Anthony Crider’s The Order of the Dolphin: Origins of SETI See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying. Back in the Victorian era ‘recipes’ for the perfect fly-tying involved the most exotic of materials - fancy threads, unusual bits of fur and, most importantly, exotic and rare feathers. Of course, you’d imagine the point of creating these elaborate flys is to sucker in the biggest possible fish. But salmon don’t give a shit about the colour or the beauty of flies. They eat anything that looks and behaves insectish. But people that got into this hobby, didn’t use them to fish. Don’t be ridiculous. The idea of dropping one of their creations into the water - better yet having it scarfed down by a gross fish - was horrifying. The same goes for today. The overwhelming majority of the 21st-century fly-tyers have no idea how to fish. It’s all about bragging rights and respect or something… And one of the most infamous-and-modern fly-tying obsessed humans goes by the name of Edwin Rist. Rist came across fly-tying when he was 10 years old and became infatuated with tying the old Victorian recipes that called for the most exotic feathers you can imagine. Hanging out on the internet forums, Edwin quickly realized such fancy ingredients don’t come cheap. Luckily young Edwin had another obsession to distract him from elaborate fly-tying pursuits: he was also a prodigy flautist. But to be a truly competitive flute-guy, he needed a bloody excellent flute. And they too are not cheap. So, after getting into the Royal Academy of music he started to think…how could he make some serious cash? It’s here we meet the collections of Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, illustrator and Charles Darwin competitor. In the mid-1800s Wallace had murdered (sorry) collected a huge variety of critters, including many thousands of birds. Most of his collection went to The Natural History Museum at Tring. This collection is of immense historical significance and contains specimens that are exceedingly rare and irreplaceable. But when Rist found out about this collection he thought, damn that’s a lot of delicious, and lucrative, fly-tying feathers. So to further his flute career, he did the obvious thing: he hatched a plan to rob the museum and sell the feathers on the infamous dark-feather fly-tying under-web. But how did it all play out? Did Edwin do the deed? Did he flog enough feathers to buy his dream flute? And …did he get away with it? Previous episodes mentioned: How To Hide A Battleship Non Fungible Tulips Sources: The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century (2019) Kirk Wallace Johnson One Obsessed Musician, 299 Birds, and a Very Weird Crime (National Geographic) The Great Feather Heist: The curious case of a young American’s brazen raid on a British museum’s priceless collection (Smithsonian) Why The Feather Heist is the Most Bizarre Heist Story You'll Ever Read (Literature Lust) Bird skins stolen in museum raid (BBC August 2009) On the Hunt for Hundreds of Rare Birds Stolen From a Museum (Audubon) Musician sentenced for rare bird skins theft (BBC April 8, 2011) Natural History Museum thief ordered to pay thousands (BBC July 30, 2011) Alfred Russel Wallace (Wikipedia)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it? This has been a long-standing challenge and the military’s best attempts were all pretty average. Low visibility grey was their answer. Not a great answer, but an answer. In April 1917, German U-boats were sinking 8 battleships a day! Grey battleships were not cutting it. The person who came forward with a solution was no less than an artist from the British Army, Norman Wilkinson. His brilliant idea? It’s impossible to camouflage ships, so let’s do the total opposite. Wilkinson’s aim was not to conceal the battleships but to confuse the enemy. He developed a radical camouflage scheme that used bold shapes and violent contrasts of colour and coined it dazzle camouflage. These ships look like floating cubist paintings. They are entirely ridiculous. You can probably guess the army’s reaction. For an institution that prided itself on being sneaky and subtle, this was far too radical and bright. During a demonstration of dazzle, it’s said that a confused U.S. admiral went off, yelling, “How the hell do you expect me to estimate the course of a God-damn thing all painted up like that?”. Wilkinson was subsequently asked to help set up an American dazzle department under the Navy’s Bureau of Construction and Repair. But it turns out that the history of dazzle camouflage is not such a simple story. Wilkinson claimed the idea. But, aside from nature having perfected dazzle camouflage over millennia (hello zebras on the savanna), quite a few other chaps came up with pretty much the exact same strategy. While it’s entertaining to try and untangle who deserves the ultimate dazzle crown, there’s another question that really needs answering: did dazzle camouflage actually work? Sources: Norman Wilkinson (artist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wilkinson_(artist) Norman Wilkinson https://artuk.org/discover/artists/wilkinson-norman-18781971 Norman Wilkinson CBE RI https://darnleyfineart.com/artist/norman-wilkinson/ WW1: How did an artist help Britain fight the war at sea? https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/how-did-an-artist-help-britain-fight-the-war-at-sea/zmkx8xs Toy Boat Camouflage http://camoupedia.blogspot.com/2012/07/toy-boat-camouflage.html Camoufleuse: The Dazzling of Women at War https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/camoufleuse Dazzle camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage Women Camouflage Artists http://camoupedia.blogspot.com/2010/03/women-camouflage-artists.html How the Absurd "Dazzle" Camouflage Strategy Ended WWI Carnage https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/how-the-absurd-dazzle-camouflage-strategy-ended-wwi-carnage When the British Wanted to Camouflage Their Warships, They Made Them Dazzle https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-british-wanted-camouflage-their-warships-they-made-them-dazzle-180958657/ http://camoupedia.blogspot.com/2010/10/william-andrew-mackay-and-optical.html See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum? Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot. But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science. And so today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - name of…science?). These experiments are daring, shocking, hideously painful and, at times, absolutely the last thing you would want to do to yourself as a human. (And it will come as perhaps deeply unshocking that just 12 of 465 cases of self-experimentation over the last 200 years were women). These experiments weren’t all pain without glory, however. Seven documented self-experimenters went on to win Nobel Prizes for their self-experimentation work. And incredibly, in 89% of instances, the self-experimenters obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or produced valuable data. But not all of them. Some saw catastrophic levels of failure. Some died. And some held science back by decades by their work. Is this kind of self-as-guinea-pig testing ethical? And how far is too far? The heroes, the idiots and the sad stories are all here. Previously mentioned episodes: The Schmidt Pain Index! Barry Marshall Drinks Something Weird! Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy Sources Jason Bittel’s This Guy Got Himself Stung 1,000 Times For Science—Here’s What He Learned Dominic Bliss’s National Geographic article: This man gets bitten by deadly snakes in the name of science Alex Boese’s Electrified Sheep Jennifer Levine’s Notable examples of self-experimentation in science Stubbins Ffirth: An Inaugural Dissertation on Malignant Fever; with an attempt to prove its non-contagious nature from reason, observation, and experiment Laura Turner Garrison’s Mental Floss article 10 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves Brian P Hanley, William Bains and George Church’s Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, and Views Among Ethics Committees and Prominent Scientists in Rejuvenation Research Healthline: From Metabolism to LSD: 7 Researchers Who Experimented on Themselves New Scientist’s The high life of the self-experimenters Wikipedia: Self-experimentation in medicine Wikipedia: The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic Window Through Time: The vomit-drinking doctor, Stubbins Ffirth (1784 – 1820) Allen B Weisse’s Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research in Tex Heart Inst J See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD! If there’s one thing you can rely on history to provide, it’s infinite examples of how men across the ages have laboured to enhance, increase, or at the very least enable performance… Erectile dysfunction shows up in Egyptian tombs, Greek cup paintings, and even the Old Testament, with no limit to the wacky treatments they dreamed up to treat it. Not least, drinking the semen of hawks and eagles (how the hell do you get that stuff?). On this very show, we’ve talked about some of these sophisticated, not-exactly-scientifically sound performance enhancers over the years from special elixirs to penile prostheses to testicle grafts. And of course, more mechanical means have also been tried for centuries. But today’s fix is all in the realm of chemical intervention and actual science! There’s a first time for everything, huh? 1983 was the year that real science came to the fore, but not quite in the way we’ve come to expect. Renowned physiologist Sir Giles Skey Brindley made an impractical yet convincing discovery involving phentolamine injections and lacking animal models, he used himself as a guinea pig. Dressed in a loose tracksuit and with some prior preparatory injections, Brindley presented his findings in what has now come to be known as the infamous Brindley lecture, aka how NOT to communicate science. Luckily, just 6 years after this exceptional performance the main scientific surprise discovery of today’s tale arises… British Pfizer scientists Peter Dunn and Albert Wood had been researching a drug that they hoped would be good for treating high blood pressure, imaginatively calling it UK-92480. Early trials indicated little hope for its use as a heart disease treatment, nevertheless, a British patent was filed for sildenafil citrate, AKA Viagra, as a heart medication. Of course, we all know what viagra became famous for. But Viagra’s erective effects were most emphatically a happy accident, and if it hadn’t been for an especially observant nurse, it may never have thrust its way into the spotlight. Previous episodes mentioned: Dr Serge Voronoff's Monkey Balls! Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard and The Origin of Performance Enhancing Drugs! A Brief History of Penis Transplants A Brief History of Aphrodisiacs! Sources The Little Blue Pill: An Oral History of Viagra The story of the drug that changed sex and made billions. By John Tozzi and Jared S Hopkins https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-11/the-little-blue-pill-an-oral-history-of-viagra?leadSource=uverify%20wall The Viagra Craze - A pill to cure impotence? Afflicted men are saying Yesss! But is this the end of sex as we know it? By Bruce Handy https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,988274-3,00.html How to give an unforgettable talk. By Chris Nickson https://litfl.com/how-to-give-an-unforgettable-talk/ Klotz, L, How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture - December 2005BJU International 96(7):956-7 DOI:10.1111/j.1464-410X.2005.05797.x Revatio vs. Viagra: What's the Difference? https://www.forhims.com/blog/revatio-vs-viagra-whats-difference From Viagra to Valium, the drugs that were discovered by accident. By James Rudd Tue https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jul/11/from-viagra-to-valium-the-drugs-that-were-discovered-by-accident 30 Life-Changing Inventions That Were Totally Accidental https://bestlifeonline.com/accidental-inventions/ Laurence Klotz, MD, FRCSC - Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Toronto, Ontario, Canada https://grandroundsinurology.com/author/lklotz/ Before Viagra, There Were Penis Injections https://science.howstuffworks.com/viagra3.htm Viagra’s famously surprising origin story is actually a pretty common way to find new drugs Katherine Ellen Foley https://qz.com/1070732/viagras-famously-surprising-origin-story-is-actually-a-pretty-common-way-to-find-new-drugs Kristen Gurtner, Amanda Saltzman, Kristi Hebert, and Eric Laborde, Erectile Dysfunction: A Review of Historical Treatments With a Focus on the Development of the Inflatable Penile Prosthesis. Am J Mens Health. 2017 May; 11(3): 479–486. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5675239/ Viagra: The little blue pill that could - Jacque Wilson, CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/27/health/viagra-anniversary-timeline/index.html Brindley, G ”Cavernosal alpha-blockade: a new technique for investigating and treating erectile impotence" — Br J Psychiatry 1983 Oct;143:332-7. doi: 10.1192/bjp.143.4.332. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6626852/ https://royalsociety.org/people/giles-brindley-11138/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_BrindleySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A little bonus episode for you today, and we hope you enjoy the shorter format. Let us know in the comments on YouTube or by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts if you would like more episodes in this bite-sized form. If you have listened to the previous episode “What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?”, you’ll know that National Geographic sent out a survey using scratch and sniff cards back in 1986. The scents they included were: banana, musk, cloves, rose, androstenone (a chemical found in sweat) and… mercaptans. Today we expand on the tragedy that made mercaptans famous, and why we tend to enjoy this very unique smell more as we age. LINKS: The Wholesome Show on YouTube SOURCES: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/new-london-texas-school-explosion/ https://www.gasodorizer.com/gas-odorization-history/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.