The BrainFood Show

The BrainFood Show

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The BrainFood Show episodes

  • The Weapons of WWII

    From the terrifyingly effective De-bollocker to the ugly little boat

    that won WWII to the German fighter that dissolved its pilots alive,
    this is the story of several of the more interesting weapons utilized in
    the world's most terrifying war.
    Hosts: Simon Whistler and Daven Hiskey
    Authors: Daven Hiskey, Gilles Messier, Karl Smallwood
    Producers: Samuel Avila and Pacience Hiskey


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    3 hr 1 min
  • The Most Bizarre Substance Known to Science and What It Can Do

    If ever there was a criminally underrated natural resource, it would

    have to be Helium. Though most commonly associated with party balloons
    and making one’s voice sound like a cartoon, Helium’s most important
    application is in cooling the magnets of Magnetic Resonance Imaging or
    MRI machines. While the finite and ever-dwindling global supply of this
    vitally important gas is a topic worthy of its own video, perhaps even
    more fascinating is just how bizarre an element Helium truly is. For if
    Helium is liquefied and cooled to a low enough temperature, it begins to
    behave like no other liquid on earth, seemingly violating the laws of
    gravity, thermodynamics, and even logic itself. This is the story of
    superfluid Helium II, the weirdest substance known to science.
    In order for Helium to be liquefied, it must be cooled to a temperature
    of -268.8 degrees Celsius or 4.2 Kelvin – that is, only 4.2 degrees
    above Absolute Zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible. By
    contrast, Nitrogen liquefies at a relatively balmy 77 Kelvin, Oxygen at
    54 Kelvin, and Hydrogen at 33 Kelvin. The reason Helium is so difficult
    to liquefy lies in its electron orbitals being completely filled, making
    it – like the other noble gases Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, and Radon –
    electrically neutral and chemically inert. This means that the only
    force which can pull Helium atoms together is the so-called Van de Waals
    Force, which is caused by electrons shifting from one side of an atom
    to the other and creating a momentary electrostatic charge. This force
    is incredibly weak, meaning that Helium must be cooled to extremely low
    temperatures in order for the Van de Waals forces to overcome the energy
    of the moving atoms and pull them close enough together for the gas to
    liquefy. Solidifying Helium is even more difficult – so difficult, in
    fact, that it cannot be done at regular atmospheric pressures. Only at
    pressures of 25 atmospheres and above can solid Helium be created.


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    17 min
  • How the Hell Did Winston Churchill Lose the Election Right After Defeating Germany?

    Nazi Germany officially surrendered on May 7, 1945. With the war still

    raging in the Pacific against Japan and sporting a popularity rate at
    around 83%, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill seemed a shoe-in to
    maintain his position as Prime Minister of the British Empire. Just
    before the announcement of the results of the election, Churchill had
    been at the Potsdam Conference with U.S. President Truman and Joseph
    Stalin, only intending to travel home briefly to accept his victory, and
    then back to the conference. Yet a funny thing happened on July 26,
    1945, the voting populace of the UK, which had turned out in record
    numbers of 73%, had decided to collectively say “Thanks for your
    service, Winston, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction,” in a
    landslide defeat that shocked the world.
    While in more modern times you might think some sort of scandalous
    affair or offensive comment may have whipped up the mob on the interwebs
    precipitating such a massive electoral fall in the span of just a
    couple months, there was no such issue here either. So what happened?
    How did this wildly successful politician, frequently named among the
    top Prime Ministers ever in the nation, at the height of his popularity
    no less, and who had just helped successfully guide Britain through one
    of its most harrowing periods of its storied history, not just lose, but
    lose in a landslide?
    And not only this, making the whole thing even more inexplicable, he
    lost to a man who one of said man’s own party members, Aneurin Bevan,
    stated “seems determined to make a trumpet sound like a tin whistle.” Or
    as chairman of the Daily Mirror, Cecil King, would remark in 1940, he
    was “of very limited intelligence and no personality. If one heard he
    was getting £6 a week in the service of the East Ham Corporation, one
    would be surprised he was earning so much.” Or, let’s not stop there, as
    famed social reformer Beatrice Webb would remark, “He looked and spoke
    like an insignificant elderly clerk, without distinction in the voice,
    manner or substance of his discourse. To realize that this little
    non-entity is… presumably the future Prime Minister, is pitiable.” Or
    how about as Churchill himself would allegedly quip about his opponent,
    he is "a modest man, but then, he has so much to be modest about."
    The demeaning quotes about the man Churchill lost to go on and on and
    on, and his own party before, during, and after the election likewise
    tried to oust him as their leader…. Only to see this quiet, oft’
    forgotten individual who rapidly rose from a middle class background to
    the heights of power, defy them all and go on to become one of the
    greatest Prime Ministers in the history of the nation, often even ranked
    above Churchill himself, despite only serving in the position for a
    handful of years.
    As ever, of course, the devil is in the fascinating details, so let’s
    dive into it, and what specifically happened to see a titan of history
    defeated by a man likely no one outside of the UK even knows the name
    of, yet shaped the Britain we have today arguably more significantly
    than Churchill ever did.


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    26 min
  • The Real Color of the Sun, How Many Nuclear Bomb Powered Rockets It Would Take to Stop the Earth Orbiting the Sun and Much, Much More

    ⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the clandestine way Niel Armstrong managed to get his application to the astronaut program in despite submitting it past the deadline. We then look at why he got to be first to walk on the moon when precedent should have had it been Buzz Aldrin.  Next up we look at the oft’ forgotten second thing Armstrong said when stepping out onto the moon.

    Moving swiftly on we do a rapid fire of a variety of space related bonus facts including, but not limited to, the real color of the Sun, how much energy it would take to cause the Earth to stop orbiting the Sun, how old the Sun is in Sun years, how many Sun rises and sunsets astronauts aboard the International Space Station see every day, etc.

    And for those curious on Simon and my treatise on the proper order of watching Star Trek series and other such thoughts, ⁠the mentioned forum post is here.

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    1 hr 4 min
  • The Most Badass U.S. President and His Many Insane Exploits

    If you've followed this website, our YouTube channel, or BrainFood Show

    podcast very long, you know one of our favorite historic individuals is
    Theodore Roosevelt- among countless other reasons to be admired, a man
    who enjoys a reputation as one of the most terrifyingly badass
    individuals to ever hold the office of leader of a nation, with
    countless stories detailing his cartoonishly manly exploits. For just a
    small sample to start, at one point while he was living as a rancher,
    some thieves stole his boat in the middle of an ice storm. Given the
    rather dangerous weather conditions, you might think he'd just let them
    go. But this was Teddy Roosevelt and it was the principal of the thing.
    He states, "In any wild country where the power of law is little felt or
    heeded, and where every one has to rely upon himself for protection,
    men soon get to feel that it is in the highest degree unwise to submit
    to any wrong…no matter what cost of risk or trouble. To submit tamely
    and meekly to theft or to any other injury is to invite almost certain
    repetition of the offense, in a place where self-reliant hardihood and
    the ability to hold one’s own under all circumstances rank as the first
    of virtues."
    Thus, he spent the next three days building another boat so he could
    track the thieves down and take his original boat back. Once done, it
    took him a few days of searching, but using his prodigious skills as a
    master tracker, he managed to find and capture the men. However,
    ultimately the river became too frozen over to continue to the nearest
    town that way, so instead he sent his ranch hand companions home and
    marched the thieves on foot, alone for 40 hours straight to town. During
    this trek, he did not bind the thieves' in any way as he felt sure
    they'd suffer from frostbite if he did so. To keep them from
    overpowering him while they trudged along through the frozen wasteland,
    he simply kept a gun trained on them and, while they slept during rest
    periods, he kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy's then relatively
    recently published Anna Karenina.
    It's also noteworthy here that because of the weather conditions, the
    fact that he was in hostile territory in the middle of nowhere, and
    escorting a trio of criminals who would have killed him without
    hesitation if he'd given them the chance, he was within his rights to
    simply execute them on the spot and go home, something the vast majority
    of lawmen of his era would have done. Roosevelt, however, felt they
    deserved a trial...


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    19 min
  • WTF is Up with the McDonald's McRib?

    The McRib is a food with both a devout following and many detractors.

    But what is the genesis of the world’s most popular fast food chain’s
    most mysterious menu item? And why, oh why, is it not available all the
    time like the majority of the rest of the McDonald’s menu?
    Cooking ribs in the Americas predates the colonial period. But the
    earliest records of Europeans cooking foods near what we would call
    barbeque were in colonial Virginia. Settlers observed a native way to
    cook meat, and they adapted it to their tastes. Later, as slaves were
    brought in from Caribbean plantations, the food genre we know as
    barbeque developed.
    In fact, the word barbeque is a loan word from the Taino language of the
    Caribbean. It was originally called barbacoa. It is unclear whether the
    name comes from the native islander's method of cutting the meat or the
    wooden frame on which the food was smoked. In any case, after it
    arrived in the North American colonies, it spread wherever pork was
    plentiful.
    Important here to the story of the McRib is that barbeque, in the proper
    sense, is any meat that is slow-cooked over indirect heat, usually
    wood, and not merely meat with barbeque sauce on it. It can take up to
    eighteen hours to turn raw meat into barbeque for it to reach
    perfection. If brined first, it can take an additional day.
    That is part of what makes the McRib a surprise. Rib joints usually
    slow-cook. Many places brine it before smoking. Additionally, cooking
    with a wood fire is inherently messy. Barbeque meat is also often hand
    butchered. None of this lends itself to a fast food chain that in 2011
    had to abandon the idea of using celery root in one of its food items
    because to offer the item, McDonald's would have had to buy all of the
    world’s celery root supply, and there still would not have been enough
    celery to meet the projected demand. A frequent problem for the
    restaurant chain that annually serves 1/27th of all restaurant food
    consumed in the world, and caters to about 1 percent of the world’s
    population on any given day.


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    19 min
  • Are the Odds of Successfully Navigating an Asteroid Field Really Approximately 3,720 to 1?

    ⁠⁠In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we begin by discussing the real origin of Tang and what that has to do with Pop Rocks and how they work. We then move on to the interesting story behind the invention of Velcro and how it works.

    Next up we look at whether NASA really spent many millions of dollars developing the famous “space pen” instead of just using a pencil like the Russians.

    Moving on from there we discuss the fascinating reason why only one side of the moon faces the Earth and how this happened and is still happening, with the Earth itself slowing down such that in theory at some point only one side of it will face the moon.

    Moving on, we look at what the actual odds of navigating a typical asteroid field in space would be and whether the depictions in movies here are actually accurate.

    Finally, we respond to some user feedback, including on initial attempts listeners of the female persuasion have made to pee standing up without peeing all over themselves (which sounds even weirder to write, but is in reference to a previous space episode ;-)), and the interesting phenomenon of people using the show to fall asleep every night and whether we should take that as a good thing or a bad thing…


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    1 hr 4 min
  • Why Don't Plane Windows and Seats Line Up?

    While airplane manufacturers do design the planes with general row

    positioning and pitch (the measurement from one seat to the same exact
    point on the seat in front or behind it) in mind, with the windows often
    lining up with the seats, the designers' exact recommended arrangement
    is rarely, if ever, followed. You see, the final placement of seats is
    left up to the individual airlines that purchase the plane.
    To make the seating arrangement as flexible as possible for airlines,
    there are multiple tracks on the floors that the seats are mounted on.
    This allows the seats to easily be moved closer together or farther
    apart. The airlines can even switch the aisle arrangement via moving a
    line of seats to a completely different track.
    For example, on some versions of the Boeing 777, Boeing recommends a
    layout of 3+3+3 with a 32 inch (81.2 cm) pitch for economy passengers.
    In this layout, you need a passenger density of 67% before a passenger
    may be required to sit next to someone else. And if some passengers
    choose to sit next to one another, the percentage is even higher before
    other passengers must sit next to someone. Boeing recommends this layout
    because, in internal studies they've conducted, they claim that one of
    the biggest factors in passenger perception of comfort on a flight is
    whether there is someone directly next to them or not.
    Nevertheless, disregarding the manufacturer recommendation, pitch on
    a...


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    19 min
  • What was It Really Like to Be a Gladiator?

    Gladiatorial combat may seem outdated and barbaric, but it is, at its

    heart, a combat sport like mixed martial arts, boxing, and even
    professional wrestling, with very similar appeal. There were clearly
    defined rules, a sense of dramatic flair with costumes, and even
    character archetypes. It was indeed bloody, but not as nearly as fatal
    as many think today. Not every gladiator died in the arena, and those
    who made it past their first handful of matches even less so beyond.
    That isn’t to say that gladiator fights didn’t also come with many
    deaths. For example, gladiator combat was usually accompanied by other
    events such as parades, animal hunts, glorified prisoner executions
    dressed up as combat practice for gladiators, and even occasional
    audience fatalities. But how did the games get started, what was life
    actually like for a typical gladiator, and how did these ubiquitous
    games rather suddenly cease to be a thing after so many centuries of
    widespread extreme popularity?


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    21 min
  • WTF is Up with Breathable Liquids?

    At the end of James Cameron’s 1989 underwater thriller The Abyss, oil

    rig diver Bud Brigman, played by Ed Harris, dons an experimental diving
    suit in which instead of air he breathes a special oxygenated liquid.
    This allows him to avoid the lethal effects of extreme water pressure
    and descend to the bottom of a deep ocean trench to defuse a nuclear
    warhead. While certainly a memorable plot device, surely such a
    technology is pure science fiction, right?
    Well, not as much as you might think. The breathing fluid depicted in
    the film, oxygenated perfluorocarbon, actually exists, and while scenes
    with the diving suit were filmed with Ed Harris holding his breath, an
    earlier scene in which a rat is immersed in breathing fluid was filmed
    for real. While The Abyss is certainly the most famous depiction of
    liquid breathing, the technology has been experimented with for over a
    century, and while it might not be quite ready for use in deep-sea
    diving, it may have lifesaving applications in the field of medicine.


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    13 min

About The BrainFood Show

From the publisher's feed

In this show, the team behind the wildly popular TodayIFoundOut YouTube channel do deep dives into a variety of fascinating topics to help you feed your brain with interesting knowledge.