The BrainFood Show

At 11:15 PM on August 3, 1958, United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower received a historic radio message: “Nautilus 90 North.” U.S.S. Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, had just reached the North Pole while sailing beneath the Arctic ice cap. Known as Project Sunshine, this submerged voyage to the top of the world was designed to show off the superiority of nuclear power for naval propulsion and salvage American pride following the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, the year before. It was also the triumphant culmination of a decades-long dream. For while Nautilus’s atomic power plant ultimately allowed her to succeed in her mission, she was not the first submarine - or even the first vessel named Nautilus - to attempt an Arctic voyage. Nearly three decades earlier a maverick Australian explorer, sailing in a far cruder war-surplus submarine, also set out to conquer the Pole from beneath. But while this now-forgotten expedition was beset with misfortunes and ultimately met with failure, its mission was bold and visionary and set the stage for a century of Polar exploration. And the man behind it all? Few humans in history can match his exploits in adventure. This is the incredible story of a man whose life was like something out of a movie, Sir Hubert Wilkins, and the doomed voyage of the Nautilus.

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In February of 1958, the Ford Motor Company unveiled an extraordinary concept for the automobile of the future. Dubbed the Nucleon, the vehicle was a showcase of mid-century styling and technology, featuring sleek, futuristic lines, optional tail fins, one-piece wrap-around front and rear windscreens, electric torque converters, proximity sensors, and automatic climate control for the cabin. Oh, and for those who care about such things was powered by a miniature nuclear reactor… As Ford’s ad copy breathlessly proclaimed:

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At 10 PM on New Year’s Eve, 1963, a U.S. Air Force C-124 Globemaster transport aircraft touched down on a runway in North Bay, Ontario. Under the cover of darkness, seven large metal canisters were unloaded from the aircraft and placed aboard a truck marked EXPLOSIVES. This truck then spirited the canisters through the security gate to the nearby Royal Canadian Air Force Base, where they were securely locked away in a thick concrete bunker. Inside were W40 atomic warheads, each with a yield of 10 kilotons of TNT - the first nuclear weapons to be delivered to Canada.

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In this episode of The Brain Food Show podcast, we discuss one of the more remarkable individuals in modern history- Theodore Roosevelt. In particular we look at that time he risked life and limb on what amounted to a “principal of the thing” matter, and another time he quite literally shrugged off a bullet to the chest to immediately after give an hour and a half long speech…

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“Come on, Daddy needs a liveable planet he can rule with an iron fist.” - Sheldon Cooper This is a quote from a season 9 episode of The Big Bang Theory released in 2016 called The Sales Call Sublimation. An episode that is largely noteworthy, at least for the purposes of discussing studios and advertising, for being about 18 minutes long despite being a show that was specifically made to fill a half hour time slot. A timeslot that quite literally had, over the years, slowly become about half ads.

More specifically, The Sales Call Sublimation clocked in at exactly 18 minutes and 34 seconds long. When you take into account the length of the title sequence, about 22 seconds, and also the credits, which tend to be about 30 seconds, the episode actually clocks in at about 17 and a half minutes of actual content, which for an episode of The Big Bang Theory is just enough time to get close to their maximum quota of one joke that vaguely hints at being funny per episode.

For comparison's sake, the first episode of the show clocked in at 21 minutes and 56 seconds long. This means that between 2007 when the show premiered and 2016 when the 9th season was underway, episodes of The Big Bang Theory got about 3-4 minutes shorter. All so that the network could run more ads against it.

Noteworthy in all this, networks ALSO tend to run ads during credits as well as often making use of things like banner ads during content, so calculating the exact amount of time a viewer was having their eyeballs bombarded by advertisements is difficult.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this because, well, it’s The Big Bang Theory, and who really cares about that show? But this has been an observable trend for decades with basically every major network staple getting ever so slightly shorter with each passing year. For example, newer episodes of The Simpsons are routinely 2-3 minutes shorter than they were back in the 1990’s, meanwhile newer episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, AKA, One Piece for Soccer Moms, similarly run about a minute or two shorter than they did when the show first aired in 2005. Which seems kind of odd given audiences in the 1990s were much more captive to what was currently being shown, and on the whole had longer attention spans than today.

Of course there can be legitimate, creatively justified reasons for an episode to run slightly longer or shorter than its normal average runtime, like ending on a cliffhanger or the like, but as noted this is a readily observed industry wide phenomenon that is generally blamed on advertisements. Not to mention that when shows do run over or under time, it tends to be by a few seconds and in those cases shows have numerous tricks they can use to pad or cut the runtime to reach the required length...

Author: Karl Smallwood and Daven Hiskey

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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What was the worst military aircraft of the Second World War? Given the sheer number of designs fielded by all sides throughout the conflict there is no shortage of candidates - many of which we have already covered on this channel. There was the Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet, a German rocket-powered fighter whose engine had a nasty habit of blowing up or dissolving the pilots alive. And the Messerschmitt Me-132 Gigant, a giant assault glider designed for an abortive German invasion of the British isles but pressed into service as a ponderously slow and horrendously vulnerable cargo transport. On the Allied side there was the Brewster F2A Buffalo and Douglas TBD Devastator, hopelessly outdated U.S. Naval aircraft that were brutally cut down by superior Japanese fighters the moment they first saw combat. And then there was the Fisher P-75 Eagle, a Frankenstein’s monster of a fighter cobbled together from parts of existing aircraft and deliberately designed to save its manufacturer from taking on more wartime production contracts. But when it comes to questionable design concepts, few aircraft can compete with the Boulton-Paul Defiant, a British fighter aircraft that sported a powered, four-gun turret like a bomber but no forward-firing armament. Designed around combat doctrines dating from the First World War, the Defiant enjoyed some early successes before suffering horrendous losses at the hands of more modern German fighters. As a result, it was swiftly withdrawn from day fighter duties, serving with greater success as a night fighter before being relegated to training and rescue duties and quietly retired. Yet while the flawed Defiant never earned the glory of its more illustrious stablemates, the Supermarine Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane, it nonetheless played a small but important role in the war and deserves to be better remembered. This is the story of Britain’s strange and forgotten WWII “turret fighter.”

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At 10:30 AM on January 17, 1966, an enormous explosion shattered the silence over the small farming village Palomares in Spain. An enormous fireball erupted in the sky overhead, and pieces of flaming debris began raining down over the surrounding countryside. Two U.S. Air Force aircraft had collided during a routine aerial refuelling operation, killing all but four of the eleven men aboard. Within hours, the Spanish province of Almeria was crawling with U.S. military personnel. One of the two aircraft, a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber, had been carrying four hydrogen bombs with a yield of 1.1 million tons of TNT each. One of the bombs landed intact in a riverbed, while the conventional explosives aboard two others detonated on impact, contaminating large areas of Spanish countryside with toxic plutonium. The fourth bomb, however, was nowhere to be found. What followed was one of the largest peacetime naval operations in history as a fleet of U.S. Navy vessels scoured the deep waters of the Mediterranean for the missing bomb. This is the forgotten story of the 1966 Palomares Incident.

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There you are. Sitting on your couch, watching a movie, when suddenly you decide you want popcorn. So you get up and cross the room to the kitchen. But the moment you cross the threshold between the two rooms: bam! you suddenly stop in your tracks. You glance about the kitchen in confusion like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria, unable to remember why you came here in the first place. Your mind is blank, wiped clean. You return to the living room, resume your movie, and bam! it all comes back to you as if nothing happened. You get up again, and the whole cycle begins anew. If so, then don’t worry: you aren’t going crazy or suffering from early-onset dementia - or, I mean, if you are. Don’t worry about it. Soon you won’t remember you can’t remember anyway… But what is happening here? What is it about walking through a doorway that prompts our brains to suddenly erase our short-term memory? Well, sit back, keep your grey matter focussed, and let’s dive into the fascinating science behind the Doorway Effect.

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A speeding bullet ripping through an apple, a split second before the fruit disintegrates. A drop of milk splashing off a red plate, forming a perfect miniature coronet. An atomic bomb frozen just after detonation, the fireball like a giant, surreal jellyfish. The movement of a golfer captured at split-second intervals, revealing the practiced elegance of his stroke. You have probably seen these iconic images dozens of times, reproduced on postcards, in coffee table books and science textbooks, and even on art gallery walls. They are perhaps the best-known works of Doctor Harold Edgerton, an American inventor who pioneered ultra-high-speed photography and helped uncover the secret world hidden in the moments too brief for the eye to see. But Edgerton’s work went far beyond just making pretty pictures, his many inventions helping to revolutionize fields as diverse as manufacturing, biology, and ocean exploration. This is the forgotten and incredible story of ‘Doc’ Edgerton - AKA “Papa Flash” - the man who made time stand still.

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⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at a Christmas gift that resulted in one of the more celebrated books of all time. Moving on to the main content today we’re looking at a rather humorous Christmas riot at West Point and then another that had nothing to do with Christmas at Oxford. We follow this up with a myriad of rapid fire Christmas Bonus Facts.

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