Teach Me Something

We're back for part 2 of our Poison Squad series, and this time it's personal. Corporations are mad at the government, the military is mad at the manufacturers and the meatpackers are mad at...the cooks? Listen to this week's episode to see how food got more dangerous, and manufacturers got more reckless.

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The Poison Squad series is the dirty, disgusting, and at times quite nauseating tale of how the United States finally passed their first national food, water, and drug safety laws. In part 1, we'll introduce you to the hero of the story, Harvey Wiley, and we'll begin to explain the gross and dangerous things that people used to do to food.

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This week we dive into venom. What is it? What's in it? How does it work? We'll tell you all about different venomous animals, and the animals that are resistant to venom. If you've ever wondered how an anti-venom works, or how it's made, we'll answer that for you as well. We'll also talk about some recent and very exciting medical developments coming from venom research, including new types of pain medications.

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In the last part of our trilogy, we will start exploring Scottish, Welsh, and English lore. We'll give you a little background on each of these cultures, but mostly we are just going to tell you stories: a heroic tale of a monster's defeat; a love story with a rather odd middle, but a happy ending; and a New Year's tale of Gawain and the Green Knight.

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On part two of our series on the Mythology of the British Isles, we will continue to talk about the myths of Ancient Ireland. We have four very interesting tales to tell you, from the Ulster and Finian cycles. This week you'll meet the important heroes, Finn MacCool and Cú Chulainn, and hear about how serious these people were about their cattle.

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In the first episode of our trilogy, we'll briefly introduce you to the Celtic people and tell you a little about how the British Isles were populated. We'll also teach you about the cycles of Irish mythology. We'll round out the episode with two tales from Irish mythology, one about the birth of a great hero and on about the death of the Great Smiter.

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This episode we'll get into all the awesome, awful, and extremely fascinating ways that animals find and win their mates. Mating is arguably the most important function of an animal, even more important than long-term survival. Because of this, there is a wide-range of very cool behaviours that (male) animals use to give themselves a chance to reproduce. Should they look nice? Smell nice? Bring gifts? The possibilities are seemingly endless! So sit back and relax, and enjoy learning all about animal mating strategies.

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Last episode we talked mostly about asexual reproduction. This episode we'll flip the script and discuss the advantages sexual reproduction brings to the table. We'll talk about some ways that sexual organisms could be more successful, reproductively speaking, than asexual ones. I'll also try to explain a theory which suggests an evolutionary explanation for the origins of sexual reproduction.

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In this episode we discuss sexual reproduction from an evolutionary perspective, with a lot of cool animal facts thrown in. We talk about the reasons that asexual reproduction seems like a much better choice than sex, hands-down. We also talk about why the existence of males makes so little sense (evolutionarily, not philosophically), and why sex is THE big problem for evolutionary biologists.

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When I started learning about ancient medicine, my interest was piqued when I recognized several of the words used as words we still use today. This led me to dive into the world of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and learn a little about the basis of medicine at the time, humouralism. I explore other systems developed from, and linked to, the four humours; most importantly, I discuss the wildly entertaining theory of the four temperaments. Finally I delve into some word etymology and teach you some cool trivia about the origins of several current words and phrases.

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