Your Brain on Facts

Without getting into current politics, we can’t ignore the plight of children seized from parents of a particular group. And it’s not the first time either. A century ago, the American government took tens of thousands of children from Native families and placed them in boarding schools with strict assimilation practices. Their philosophy - kill the Indian to save the man.... 01:00 Indian Schools 09:00 Australia's "stolen generations" 16:00 Ceausescu's orphans 20:15 the Dionne quintuplets Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and archive.org. Links to all the research resources are on the website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Death doesn’t mean everything stop for you. There are lots of ways we can live on after shuffling off the mortal coil. From body parts taken from famous bodies, to cells that won't stop growing, to a taxidermied person on display in a museum, we look at bodies and body parts that don't let death slow them down. Topics: 02:35 Henrietta Lacks 06:40 Operation Mincemeat 10:15 Abraham Lincoln 12:00 JFK 13:45 Albert Einstein 16:30 Joseph Haydn 17:20 Frederic Chopin 18:30 Napoleon 23:45 the Tswana warrior Thanks to our special guests Dumb and Busted podcast. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and YouTube music library. Links to all the research resources are on the website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m pretty good at this wife business, but I can’t say that I would take over my husband’s public office after his death, re-edit his film to launch a genre-defining franchise, or kill an enemy general after he was over-run. However, there are a lot of women in history who would, and did, all those things and more. From French pirates to Chilean warrior to American filmmakers, we look at women who earn the title "super wife." http://bit.ly/StarWarsEdit Bunny Trails Podcast Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and archive.org. Links to all the research resources are on the website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The body is a temple and it’s our job to decorate it." From tatau in Polynesia to Sailor Jerry to the oppressed class that gave rise to the Yakuza, we touch on some highlights from the history of tattoos. Huge thanks to my guest presenter Mike "Hobbit" Bickett from Geeks Under the Influence Podcast network. Check out the episode of Smack My Pitch Up he let me do with him. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and archive.org. Links to all the research resources are on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all lose things -- keys, wallets, patience -- but how do you lose an entire city? Hear the stories of three American towns built in a hurry but kept off the map, secure Soviet enclaves known by their post codes, ancient cities found by modern technology, and the ingenious engineering of underground dwellings. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Links to all the research resources are on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Independence Day, we're doing a two-parter on heroic animals, innovations from the field, and noteworthy bad-asses. Topics include a pigeon who saved hundreds of lives, a crossbow for grenades and Jack Churchill, who went into WWI with a claymore and bagpipes, despite not being Scottish. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Links to all the research resources are on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For Independence Day, we're doing a two-parter on heroic animals, innovations from the field, and noteworthy bad-asses. Topics include a pigeon who saved hundreds of lives, a crossbow for grenades and Jack Churchill, who went into WWI with a claymore and bagpipes, despite not being Scottish. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ecce Homo was a fresco of Jesus Christ that had degraded significantly over time. No one asked the little old lady next door to help. She had no training, but how hard could it really be? Pretty damn hard, as it turns out. In place of the Renaissance-style face was now a smeary circle, wreathed in what looks like a marabou balaclava, with a nose like a folk-art sock doll, the crooked, misplaced eyes of a failed anime sketch, and a mouth like a lipstick smear left by a bass. In the height of irony, many priceless works of art and antiquities have been destroyed by the people who were trying to preserve them. Modern art can be especially susceptible to accidental destruction by well-meaning parties. Some things were destroyed by unthinking or unfeeling people. Some relics were destroyed for the sake of money, even entire pyramids. Some things were destroyed by people who think they’re more important than, ya know, the history of the planet and its people. But seeing is believing! You can find galleries of some of the examples here and here. All of the links used in our research are on the website. Thanks to our super-fan Michael K for his review, support and today's topic. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and sound effects from freesound.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My father was a sci-fi fan of the old school. The man had the entire original Star Trek series on VHS, commercial free, and an Enterprise technical manual. So in his honor, a little late for Father's Day, we go back in time to look to the future as we dive into the wormhole of classic sci-fi. With segments voiced by Shaun Ennis, host of Stories of Yore and Yours. Topics include Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Robert Chambers and cosmic horror, NOT H. P. Lovecraft, William Hodgson and dying earth, Richard Jeffries and the invention of post-apocalptia, Olaf Stapledon and the multi-verse, the origin of the word "robot," Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, John Campbell's Astounding Stories, the first and the longest-running sci-fi TV show and where all the tapes went, and the OG of sci-fi... Star Trek! You can find all the links used to research this episodes on our website, but here's the one you wanted, the pics of the skant uniform. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and sound effects from freesound.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A strategic reserve is a commodity held back by governments to stabilize prices or protect against shortage. Your mind may go immediately to the 35 million barrels or so of crude oil that the US has in storage, but there are all kinds of strategic reserves around the world. From cotton in China, to butter and wine in the EU, to the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, we talk about strange stockpiles (mostly food) and their effect on producers and consumers. To read more about any of these topics, you can find all of the research resources on our website. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and sound effects from freesound.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We assign a great deal of significant to last words. We expect them to be deep and profound, the sort of thing you immortalize on a $3,000 headstone. We hope we’ll say something really clever when it’s our turn, and not “what’s this button do?” or “hold my beer.” But you may end up with last words like American author Henry David Thoreau, who simply said “moose...Indian.” From the profound to the prophetic, from the ironic to the ignominious, from founding fathers to TV stars, we look into the final utterances of the famous and infamous alike. Read the full script at yourbrainonfacts.com/last-words Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and sound effects from freesound.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some actors fall victim to typecasting, but others have a single character they can't disassociate themselves from. Sometimes that means always being cast as a character similar to the one they made famous or that made them famous, or not really being cast at all. Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Music by Kevin MacLeod and sound effects from freesound.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a monkey takes a picture in the woods, can the monkey claim the copyright? Trademark and copyright laws can get pretty sticky. For the layperson, trademark, copyright and patent sound interchangeable. Find our who called dibs on phrases like "you're fired," "one more thing," and "let's play." Learn about cases where people tried to claim things they couldn't, only to get smacked down in court. If you work in advertising, stay tuned for a list of words and phrases that will cost you a lot of money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we cover the way people in Victorian Europe used (and abused) Egyptian mummies, whether or not mummies were burned for fuel, Catholic saints who do not decay, natural mummies preserved in ice, moss, and salt, child mummies of the Andes, and Buddhist monk mummifying themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the skin between your thumb and forefinger to the stringy things you have to pick off bananas, today's episode will teach you dozens of names for everyday items, even if you can't tell your natiform from your weenus. Here are your new vocab words, in order of appearance: acnestis niddick feat glabella caruncula philtrum weenus rasceta pericule lunules Morton's toe minimus Brannock device hallux throat vamp aglet paresthesia obdormition dysania armscyes nurdle wamble borborygmus crapulence crepuscular rays apricity petrichor chrysalism pareidolia natiform phosphene zarf anecdoche kenopsia monachopsis vellichor joska masticate misophonia vagitus accumbation scurryfunge muntin punt agraffe ulage barm cornicione phloem bundle druplets anemoia defenestrate zugzwang mondegreen eggcorn malaproprism spoonerism grawlix agitron octothorpe intterobang griffonage jot tittle apthong palindrome semordnilap contranym lemniscate obelus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you think of big heists, your mind probably goes to banks, jewelry, and fine art, or maybe a casino vault; carefully organized plans by people dressed in black turtlenecks with plenty of cool gadgets and close calls. What we remember as the daring heist of one of the world’s most famous paintings was really neither of those. The theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa wasn’t even noticed when it happened. That story, plus a stolen art technique that made a man world famous, credit stolen for one of the most important discoveries in biology, the man who was namesake the pyramid scheme, and a stolen film role that launched a career. Thanks for bearing with me through the rough audio quality lately. I've been studying and practicing and I think you'll notice real improvement starting this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A microphone is a good enough platform for getting back at people, but an entire recording studio is even better. Popular music is littered with songs getting back at an ex lover, from Waylon Jennings to Taylor Swift, but a fair number of the tracks you know by heart are actually clap-backs to the people in the mixing booth or the record label offices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From trolls and griefers, to crashing virtual funerals and spreading digital plagues, we look at online gamers ruining everyone else's fun in the first of our series We Can't Have Nice Things. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Small things can have reverberating effects on history, both good and bad. In 1453, the great walled city of Constantinople, which had withstood sieges for 1,100 years, fell to the Ottomans...because someone left the door open. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mel Brooks said it best, “It’s good to be the king.” There’s the seemingly limitless power and unspendable amounts of wealth. On the flip-side, though, there’s the back-stabbing, political intrigue, and of course, the inbreeding to deal with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hop on down the bunny trail as we examine the origins of some beloved Easter traditions and teach the goyim a little about Pesach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the age of bigger, better, faster, more, it’s easy to default to thinking that we invented everything, that the complex things that make up our lives couldn’t have existed in the times we view as primitive. Oh, how wrong we are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We dip our toes into the deep water of "the first woman to..." with pilots, daredevils, doctors, and athletes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There exists a small deserted town, which has been seized by eminent domain and condemned by the state. Why would an entire town that once housed over a thousand residents be shuttered? Because the ground under their feet was on fire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Take, for example, George Washington’s youthful proclamation on the lumberjacking of his father’s cherry tree - “I cannot tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.” It’s one of the first presidential facts American children learn in elementary school. The trouble is, that story is a complete fabrication. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gutenberg may have gotten all the press, but he wasn't the first to use movable type. Think you know the first video game or who was the first to fly across the Atlantic? Listen in and see! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You say potato, I say a dangerous tuber that people will only eat in the face of actual starvation. You say tomato, I say a poison apple from the mysterious new world that’s killing the aristocracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From a lone example of a trilobite in Hunan, China named Han Solo to a butterfly pea flower reminiscent of a Georgia O'Keefe painting, called clitoria ternatea, the naming of species offers almost as much in the way of entertainment as it does scientific classification. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From rainbow parties to Spiritualism to two bands touring as a band they're not, we take a look at some noteworthy hoaxes and false panics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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