The BrainFood Show

If your parents ever took you to a science museum or planetarium as a child, you likely spent much of your visit in the gift shop, begging them to buy you one of the hundreds of shiny – and purportedly “educational” – items on offer. And most irresistible of all was undoubtedly “astronaut food”: shiny foil packets of freeze-dried strawberries or ice cream sandwiches. Sure, they had the texture of florist’s foam, crumbled into sticky dust, and tasted like sugary chalk, but that didn’t matter: you were eating the same food as actual astronauts!

…well, sorry to ruin your cherished childhood memories, but sadly no, you weren’t. For while the freeze-drying process used to make these novel treats was originally developed for the space program, no astronaut has ever eaten gift shop “astronaut” strawberries or ice cream during a mission – for the simple reason that the crumbs would float away and wreak havoc in the spacecraft. So what do astronauts actually eat in orbit? Well, put on your spacesuit and pack your Tang as we blast off into the long, complicated, and fascinating story of space food.

Author: Gilles Messier

Host: Simon Whistler

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The shadows go in different directions! The flag is waving in a vacuum! The lander didn’t dig a crater! You can’t see any stars! It was all filmed on a soundstage by Stanley Kubrick! If any of these statements sound familiar, then odds are you’ve spent way too much time online and need to touch some grass. Ever since Bill Kaysing published his “We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle in 1976, a small but growing number of dissenters have vehemently argued that neither Neil Armstrong, nor anyone else ever stepped foot on the moon. Rather, they argue, the whole Apollo programme was nothing more than an elaborate Cold War hoax, meant to demonstrate America’s technological superiority over the Soviet Union.

But as we’ve already covered in exhaustive detail in our previous video How Do We Actually Know We Landed on the Moon? every single one of the popular arguments put forward by Kaysing and individuals in the aftermath has been thoroughly debunked. For example, looking at the examples we’ve just listed extremely briefly: the shadows are deflected by terrain; the flag had a metal rod along its top edge to keep it deployed; due to the moon’s low gravity the Lunar Module descent engine did not need to be powerful enough to dig a crater; and the exposure on the astronauts' cameras was set to photograph the bright lunar surface, meaning the faint stars didn’t register on the film, something you can try out for yourself with your own camera here on Earth if you like.

And while yes, Stanley Kubrick did direct the moon landings, as everyone knows he was such a perfectionist that he insisted on filming on location(!). Yet among all the arguments against the feasibility of manned lunar landings, one stands out among the rest - even among regular, non-terminally-online people- the van Allen Radiation Belts. These regions, located between 640 and 58,000 kilometres or 400 and 36,000 miles above the earth’s surface, are filled with high-energy electrons, protons, and other subatomic particles emitted by the sun and trapped by the earth’s magnetic field. According to conspiracy theorists, the radiation in these belts is too intense for humans to survive, making space travel outside of Low Earth Orbit impossible. But is this true? Have the Moon Landing Conspiracy people finally scored a fatal blow against NASA and the 400,000 people who worked on the Apollo Missions? Does this one, single data point, negate the literally hundreds of thousands of other confirmations we have during the Apollo Missions and countless more since? Well, no. But this wouldn’t be a very convincing or interesting video if we stopped there. And, in truth, it’s a great question. And has a super interesting answer with a lot of interesting things to learn along the way.

So how did the Apollo astronauts survive crossing such a dangerous region of outer space?

Well, slip into your space suit- pull on your lead-lined underwear -... maybe not in that order unless you want to look like Superman… as we blast off in search of answer to how the brilliant engineers and scientists working on all this solved this problem.

Author: Gilles Messier

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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While just about everyone is abundantly familiar with Adolf Hitler’s exploits in the latter half of his life, an often missed part of the once proclaimed “German Messiah’s” history is that of his childhood. So just how did this “boy like any other” grow into arguably one of the most reviled individuals in the history of humanity? Well, put on your lederhosen and grab your machete and time machine, because we are going to be talking about baby hitler, who his parents were, whether he was actually Jewish, the exploits of his youth, what he was like as a child, his creepy high school crush, and much. much more. Let’s dive into it all shall we?

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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When the sun scorches the earth, when incandescent air burns your lungs, and especially when that glucose curve dips at 10, 2 and 4 in the afternoon … well, there is nothing better than grabbing an ice cold bottle of a very special soft drink- its purple-ish label covered in beads of cooling moisture. I am, of course, talking about the first major soft drink to be invented in America: Dr Pepper, beating Coca Cola by one year and Pepsi by eight, all the way back in 1885! Coincidence that this was the same year Doctor Emmet Brown and Marty McFly were having their little adventure? We’ll leave it to you to decide.

Non-Americans may have only a very vague idea of what Dr Pepper is, considering that it is not as ubiquitous as Coke or Pepsi. And we can even exclusively say that our glorious and unheralded third partner in our endeavors here on TodayIFoundOut in a phenomenal human by the name of Dhruv Sapra only recently tried Dr. Pepper for the first time on August 3 of 2023. But our viewers in the US are surely very familiar with its distinctive packaging and taste. Our friends in Texas in particular share a special bond with Dr Pepper, as they can revel in pride knowing that the drink was invented in their very own Waco.

Or can they? The fact is that the origin story of Dr Pepper is steeped in lore and legend, marked by contradicting versions and no conclusively confirmed facts, and may not have been invented in Texas at all. What follows is going to be us attempting to sort out that mess, while also in the process, for reasons that will soon make sense, diving into the fascinating reasons why 18 is considered the age we become adults, whether two people really are the only individuals who know the full recipe for Coca-Cola, and much, much more! So let’s dive into it, shall we?

Author: Arnaldo Teodorani

Host: Simon Whistler

Editor: Daven Hiskey

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Winning a big ticket lottery very often isn’t all that it cracked up to be and despite a windfall of cash, a surprising number of winners have gone on record as saying winning the lottery was the worst thing that ever happened to them. And some could never end up saying it because of the surprising amount of murder that occasionally happens after, as we’ll get into. But as to the more normal non-murderous awful, this is something that might have a lot to do with the fact that lottery winners (at least in the US) often receive little to no advice on how to adjust to their newfound wealth, which may sound obvious and easy to some, but there are a number of pitfalls we’re guessing most have not considered that have nothing to do with having well managed investment accounts.

Author: Daven Hiskey

Host: Simon Whistler

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As anyone who’s perused the internet knows, arguably the most bizarre mating practices of all can be found among humans, with Rule 34 being a rather immutable law of nature. But it turns out, other animal mating practices can be just as interesting, so today we’re going to be looking at the Wild and Wacky World of Animal Mating, from the bizarre, to the humorous, to the downright disgusting. So, for example, if you’ve ever wondered how porcupines mate given their quill covered bodies, want to know which animal literally helicopters their poop and pee at their mate to attract them… besides my college girlfriend that is… how Finding Nemo would have been VERY different if actually accurate to the species, the intricacies of lobster lovin’, the fascinating and rather humorous world of giraffe mating, the momentous mating that led to the darkly humorous Dead Duck Day, and much, much more, well, stick around because this one just might give you and your partner some ideas…

Authors: Daven Hiskey, Karl Smallwood, Melissa Blevins, Emily Upton

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Caden Nielsen

0:00 Intro

2:35 Porcupine Porking

5:05 Disturbing Ducks and Dead Duck Day

12:51 Hyena Lady Bits

14:08 Exploding Bees

17:50 Bees are so Freaking Cool

22:42 Honeybees are Better at Math Than You

25:04 Clownfish and Why Finding Nemo is All Wrong

30:26 The Bizarre World of Giraffe Mating

32:59 Helicoptering Hippos

33:50 White Fronted Parrot Date Night

34:27 Make Love Not War- The Bonobo

35:47 What a Way to Go

36:33 To Die For- The Black Widow and Mantis Myths

38:17 Lobster Lovin' and Popular Myths

41:50 Arabian Camel's are So Gross

43:05 Sword Fight and Nomming Man Bits

45:00 Life... uh... Finds a Way

45:43 Angler Fish Weirdness

46:30 The Romantic Mating of Seahorses

48:50 The Mating Cycle of Nightmares

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When one thinks of nuclear nations, the United Kingdom usually doesn’t spring to mind. But Old Blighty has a long and impressive record of nuclear accomplishments dating back to the very origins of the field. British scientists like William Penney, Rudolf Peierls, and John Cockcroft were instrumental in kickstarting the Manhattan Project, while on October 3, 1952 Britain became the third nation after the United States and Soviet Union to build and test its own atomic bomb. Throughout the Cold War, squadrons of Royal Air Force V-Bombers armed stood ready to counter any Soviet attack, while today the Royal Navy’s four Vanguard-class submarines, armed with up to 16 Trident II ballistic missiles each, prowl the world’s oceans on vital deterrence patrols. And on October 10, 1957, decades before better-known disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the UK became the site of one of the Nuclear Age’s first major accidents. On that day, a reactor at Cumbria accidentally caught fire, threatening to contaminate hundreds of square kilometres of English countryside with deadly radioactive fallout. This is the story of the Windscale Fire, the UK’s forgotten nuclear disaster.

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“You always remember the bad guy.” These were the words of the late David Prowse, the man who physically portrayed Darth Vader in the original trilogy and it’s kind of ridiculous just how right he was. Almost 50 years later Darth Vader is just as iconic and instantly recognisable as he was when he first power-walked into frame to his own theme song.

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team-powered, gunned-up, and utterly cursed—cruiser submarines were meant to revolutionize naval warfare. Instead, they sank their own crews more often than the enemy. Here’s the story of history’s worst sub design.

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When thinking about the middle ages, chances are that among the many images popping into your mind there stands a noble knight. Now, there are a variety of myths about what it was like to be a knight during medieval times, not just spread by Hollywood, but even by the contemporary legends during medieval times themselves- in both featuring widespread depictions of the chivalric knight rushing to the aid of damsels in distress and generally spending their time being bastions of all that is good and the very definition of "noble". We’ll get into a lot of these myths throughout this video, but within this mythology we have the white clad Christian knight, his shield or surcoat adorned with a cross. And on the other side an equally imposing Muslim horseman, peppering said knight with dozens of arrows.

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