Science & Medicine Episodes

This week, we're celebrating all kinds of mums - but no, that isn't in observance of America's Mother's Day holiday this upcoming Sunday! No, the collection of mums we're discussing are of a decidedly drier type: mummified human remains. And these aren't the millennia-old corpses of ancient Egyptian Pharoahs; no, all the mummies we're discussing come from the last century (and change) and all across the world. From a drag queen's closet in New York City to a musty Sicilian catacomb to Moscow's...

The American Revolutionary War spanned 8 bloody years of war, brutality, and conflict. When the America of today looks back on it now, we tend to look back with reverence and even idolization - but we don't think about the foul hygiene, wretched conditions, and ethical atrocities that occurred for even longer than the 8 years of war leading up to America's hard-fought freedom. This week, in honor of the July 4th holiday, Carrie takes us back in time to the stinking rooms in Independence Hall, f...

On February 19th, 1994, 31-year-old Gloria Ramirez was rushed to Riverside General Hospital after suffering severe heart palpitations, possibly caused by her advanced cervical cancer. In the ER, hospital staff began to work to try and save Gloria's life - and that's where the strangeness started. Nurses, residents, and technicians alike began to complain of severe symptoms after Gloria's blood was taken, noting a strange chemical-like smell coming from her body. Then, these very same seasoned...

Since the days of antiquity, the human race has been searching for cures for what ails us. From disease to mental illness to sexual dysfunction and more, we've always tried to find the solutions to the things that plague our health. And, sometimes, those solutions end up being even worse - and could very well even kill us. This week, we explore stories of quack doctors and snake oil salesman in history, including a Founding Father of America, the creator of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, the inven...

Throughout the many years humans have been on this Earth, we've always been prone to one problem (among many): mass hysterias. Mass hysterias are sociological and psychological phenomena that transmit collective illusions of threats (whether real or...

The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of advanced alien life in the universe - and the total lack of evidence for it here on Earth. In the conclusion to our two-part series, Sean focuses on the Fermi Paradox...

Are we all alone in the universe? There are hundreds of billions of galaxies - the largest hold trillions of stars, the smallest a few hundred million. It seems impossible that there wouldn't be civilizations out there, some of them far more advanced...

The Renaissance was a time of enlightenment, opulence, and all-around cultural rebirth. However, that’s not all it was. It was also a time of poisonous murders, toxic cosmetics, and hygienic horrors bad enough to make your hair stand on end…or maybe...

On episode 5, Carrie takes Sean through centuries of history to dissect one of the weirdest phenomena of all time—spontaneous human combustion, a.k.a when people burst into random flame, seemingly for no apparent reason. Through a few selected tales,...