In 1993, legendary director Steven Spielberg released two groundbreaking films, which could not have been more different from one another. The first was Jurassic Park, a thrilling summer blockbuster and special effects landmark about bringing dinosaurs back from extinction. The other…was Schindler’s List. Widely considered one of the most heart wrenching films ever made, Schindler’s List tells the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who, through his enamelware and ammunition factories in occupied Poland and Czechoslovakia, succeeded in saving over a thousand Jewish workers’s lives. Thanks to Spielberg’s film, Schindler is today perhaps the best known of the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations” - individuals recognized by the Yad Vashem memorial institution for assisting Jews and other victims of the Holocaust. But Schindler was far from alone, and his story bears a striking resemblance to that of another, more obscure figure: a fellow German businessman named Otto Weidt. While Weidt only managed to save the lives of around 30 employees, the sheer heroic lengths he went to to ensure their survival and defy the Nazi authorities makes his a story one well worth telling. This is the story of Nazi Germany’s forgotten “other” Oskar Schindler. Author: Gilles Messier Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Among the many box office bombs of the 2024 movie season was The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Starring Superman himself - Henry Cavill - and directed by Guy Ritchie of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels fame, the film tells the story of a ragtag team of saboteurs tasked with raiding a Nazi naval base off the African coast during the Second World War. Though highly fictionalized and over-the-top as only a Guy Ritchie film can be, the story is very loosely based on a real, daring raid that took place on January 14, 1942, which helped establish the reputation of one of the most infamous clandestine organizations in the war. This is the incredible forgotten story of Operation Postmaster. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 6, 2022 around 4 AM, a loud explosion rocked a remote corner of Elbert County, Georgia. Later that morning, the sun rose to reveal the shattered remains of America’s most mysterious and controversial public monument: the Georgia Guidestones. From the moment they were unveiled in 1980, these six massive granite slabs covered in inscriptions became a magnet for criticism and conspiracy theories, with many detractors accusing the monument of promoting satanism. As a result, the Georgia Guidestones became a target for numerous vandals, culminating in its bombing and demolition 42 years later. But what were the Georgia Guidestones, really? Who designed them, what was their purpose, and why did they attract so much fear and hate? Let’s find out as we dive into the fascinating and controversial history of “America’s Stonehenge.” Author: Gilles Messier Editor / Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 2013 video game The Last of Us and its 2023 TV adaptation, humanity is overrun by a mutant parasitic fungus called Cordyceps, which disfigures its victims and takes over their minds, turning them into violent, unthinking walking mushrooms called clickers. But this horrifying premise is hardly unique; indeed, the motif of infection and assimilation by an alien parasite crops up time and time again in popular fiction, from the 1950s novels The Puppet Masters and The Body Snatchers by Robert Heinlein and Jack Finney and their numerous screen adaptations to the 1998 film The Faculty and classic episodes of The X-Files, Star Trek: the Next Generation, The Outer Limits, and Futurama. And no wonder: horror fiction often reflects universal anxieties, and parasites have been an unwelcome part of the human experience since the dawn of time. From the tapeworms and hookworms that infect our guts to the filarial worms that cause elephantiasis to the single-celled protozoa that cause malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness and other horrible diseases, these biological infiltrators have been - and still are - responsible for a great deal of human suffering the world over. And while the mind-hijacking parasites of popular fiction may seem like gross exaggerations created for the sake of chills and thrills, this is not the case, for such creatures are horrifyingly real. For example, Cordyceps from The Last of Us is based on an actual parasitic fungus of the same name that infects ants and other small insects, hijacking their minds and bodies and turning them into mindless slaves with one single purpose: to spread their new master’s spores far and wide. Indeed, such devious puppet masters are remarkably common in the natural world, being found in nearly every habitat and family of life - including our very own bodies. This is the story of the real-life zombie makers, the most horrifying - and fascinating - creatures on earth. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus undervolt.” These words, spoken by astronaut Jim Lovell on April 13, 1970, signalled the start of one of NASA’s greatest crises. Apollo 13, the third American lunar landing mission, had suffered an onboard explosion, knocking out vital systems and placing the lives of the three astronauts aboard - Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert - in grave danger. Over the next four and a half days, thousands of engineers and technicians back on earth battled one crisis after another to keep the crippled spacecraft running and bring the astronauts safely back home. Their heroic efforts paid off when, on April 17, the Command Module Aquarius splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean and astronauts Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were brought aboard the aircraft carrier USS Iwo Jima - safe and sound. The saga of Apollo 13 has been described as a “successful failure” and “NASA’s finest hour”, and was famously dramatized in the acclaimed 1995 film starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon. But while the film is praised for its historic and technical accuracy, it by necessity takes certain liberties for the sake of drama - for example, shortening Lovell’s rather passive real-life declaration to the far more urgent “Houston, we have a problem.” But what else did the film get right and wrong, and what actually caused the Apollo 13 disaster? Let’s find out as we take a deep dive into one of the greatest dramas in the history of manned spaceflight. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At 9:00 in the morning on July 1, 1946, Major Harold Wood, bombardier of the B-29 Superfortress Dave’s Dream, peered through his bombsight at a massive fleet of warships gathered below. As the crosshairs fell over his target, he released his weapon, and the pilot, Major Woodrow Swancutt, pulled the aircraft into a sharp turn. Seconds later a blinding flash filled the air as history’s fourth atomic bomb detonated over the turquoise waters of the Pacific. But this was not some alternate timeline where the nascent Cold War suddenly went hot, but rather an elaborate test dubbed Able, part of a larger series of nuclear experiments called Operation Crossroads carried out at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. And while the target fleet included several former Axis ships including the Japanese battleship Nagato and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the vast majority were American, a motley array of obsolete battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, landing craft, and various auxiliary vessels. And at the very centre of the assembly, painted bright orange to serve as an aiming point, was a truly remarkable vessel: the battleship USS Nevada. A revolutionary design when she entered service in 1916, Nevada was present at Pearl Harbour on the morning of December 7, 1941 when the surprise attack by the Imperial Japanese Navy marked the ascendancy of the aircraft carrier over the battleship. And now, at the end of her career, she bore witness to another technological revolution: the dawning of the atomic age. This is the remarkable story of the USS Nevada, a ship that served through one of the most eventful periods in the history of naval warfare. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Selfie stick. Electrical banana. Pocket pleaser. Magic wand. Divorce maker. Buzz Nightgear. Battery Operated Boyfriend. These are but a few colourful euphemisms for womankind’s best friend, found in millions of nightstand drawers across the globe: the vibrator. If you are a connoisseur of strange product origins then you’ve likely heard the quirky and unlikely story of the vibrator’s creation, which goes something like this: during the Victorian era, women were regularly diagnosed with female hysteria, a catch-all condition covering everything from fainting, insomnia, irritability, nervousness, or excessive sexual desire - really, any inconvenient symptom a woman could exhibit. The most popular treatment for female hysteria was the pelvic or clitoral massage, performed by a doctor in a clinical setting. Being completely ignorant of the female orgasm, doctors dismissed the resulting shudders and moans of ecstasy as mere “paroxysms”, maintaining that as no vaginal penetration was involved, pelvic massage had nothing to do with sex. As the popularity of this treatment exploded, doctors devised various mechanical vibrating machines to relieve their aching fingers and wrists, speed up the massage process, and allow them to service many more patients per day. And thus, an iconic sex toy was accidentally born. It’s an entertaining story, one which has been told and retold in countless books, documentaries, and even scientific papers, and inspired several works of popular entertainment including Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning 2009 stage play In the Next Room and the 2011 film Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Pryce. It is also completely false without a shred of evidence backing any of it. Something only extremely recently revealed. That’s right: despite being widely reported as historical truth, the popular account of the vibrator’s creation is, in fact, a fantasy, concocted by a single historian based on dubious interpretations of historical records. Yet this narrative has remained largely unchallenged for more than two decades since, exposing worrying truths about how falsehoods can spread through popular culture and how academic research is fact-checked and published. This is the scandalous story of the great vibrator myth. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is among the most feared and reviled symbols in the world, the very sight of which instantly evokes thoughts of hatred, mass murder, and the worst traits of humanity. It is so repugnant as to be outright banned in many parts of the world. It is, of course, the swastika, a symmetric cross with short lines protruding at right angles from the end of its arms. Infamously adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to represent their dream of a Thousand-Year Third Reich, 80 years after the end of the Second World War the symbol continues to be used by Neo-Nazis and other far-right groups to symbolize antisemitism, white supremacy, and other hateful ideologies. Yet the Nazis did not invent the swastika; the symbol had existed for thousands of years before Adolf Hitler was even born, representing nothing more nefarious than good luck or fortune. Indeed, up until the 1930s it was ubiquitous in western culture, appearing on jewelry, buildings, sports jerseys, and even in the names of towns. And even today in many eastern countries it continues to be widely used, carrying none of the stigma it has acquired elsewhere in the world. So what happened? Where did the swastika come from, and how did it go from a beloved good luck charm to a loathed symbol of hate and oppression in less than two decades? Let’s find out as we dive into the fascinating and controversial history of the swastika. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore’s Bond and Bond girl Melina Havelock - played by Carole Bouquet - dive to the bottom of the Ionian Sea to recover a top-secret code machine from the wreck of a sunken British spy ship. There, they are suddenly attacked by one of the villain’s goons wearing what looks like a nightmarish combination of a medieval suit of armour and a giant insect exoskeleton, with a bulbous helmet, multiple round portholes, segmented limbs, and menacing mechanical claws. A similar suit also shows up in the 1989 underwater monster movie Deepstar Six. But while this contraption may look like it came from the fevered imagination of a Hollywood production designer, it is, in fact, a real piece of deep diving equipment known as an Atmospheric Diving Suit or ADS. Effectively wearable, articulated personal submarines, ADSs alleviate many of the limitations of traditional diving techniques, allowing humans to work at previously unheard-of depths. But achieving this capability has come at the cost of daunting engineering challenges, with the surprisingly long history of atmospheric diving suits being one of ingenuity, dogged trial-and-error, and incremental improvements in technology. This is the fascinating story of mankind’s quest to conquer the deep in a suit of armour. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During WWI, the senior members of the British Royal family kept awfully busy. One of them shattered his pelvis when a near thousand pound horse decided to ride him instead of the other way around, another one enjoyed some time in the trenches and examining early tanks, his brother came under fire from German warships, and their sister distributed nicotine and ‘acid tablets’ to soldiers and sailors in gift boxes. If you want to learn more about their adventures, and misadventures - including whether or not they should be held responsible for the execution of the Russian royal family, as suggested by a certain Netflix crowning achievement of streaming entertainment- well, take a look at our video here on YouTube What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWI? if you haven’t already. Among other things that video also includes a great The Road Not Taken tie in and why almost everyone universally gets that poem’s meaning quite incorrect in rather ironic ways, as well as how the man it was written about also initially misinterpreted Frosts’ intent, which was mostly just to tease him, and how that all partially helped lead to that man’s death in WWI as a result. But that was WWI. What about the story of the world’s most famous royals during WWII? Well, in what follows we will discover how a sailor Prince saved his entire crew from almost certain death via a rather spur of the moment scheme, which Monarch would be best suited to fix your carburettor, how many secret plans a King can set in motion without his nation finding out, whether the former King of England, as is often stated, really tried to buddy up to Hitler to help get his throne back after being forced to abdicate a few years earlier, and why his other brother is at the centre of a similar major conspiracy theory involving no less than Winston Churchill himself ordering his death… So, strap on your royal cape, grab your shrubbery and holy hand grenades, and let’s dive into what the British royals got up to during WWII. Authors: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila 0:00 Intro 3:20 The King is Killed and the Troublesome Heir 16:18 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth 20:57 The King’s Secret Plan 23:48 ‘Lilibet’ and ‘Margot’ 25:31 Philip of Mountbatten's Badassery 30:46 The Duke of Windsor's Virtual Exile and the Nazi Plan to Make Him King of England Again 56:14 The Duke of Gloucester 58:18 The Duke of Kent, A Plane Crash, and a Conspiracy 1:14:04 King George’s Secret Missions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those of us born relatively deep into the before times of the 20th century, it may come as a rather shocking realization that WWI occurred now over a century ago, playing as the backdrop on the positive side of astonishingly rapid progress in the fields of medicine, science, technology, literature, and the arts, along with on the downside the past, as ever being the worst, such as the Spanish Flu pandemic which while WWI was raging killing about 20 million, that Spanish flu was outdoing the humans in a much shorter span killing between 50-100 million people and infected around a half a billion around the globe between 1918 and 1920. That’s not even to mention just after the Encephalitis Lethargica which swept across the world killing over a million people while affecting numerous others, before suddenly disappearing, leaving the finest scientific minds of the age absolutely stumped, though today it’s thought to have been caused by a rare type of strep throat, which concerningly enough is still around today, and a subsequent immune response gone awry. That one was particularly horrifying as if it didn’t kill you, this illness could instead potentially trap you inside your body, stopping you from having the will to move or speak, though you’d otherwise seem perfectly healthy. A few decades after the outbreak, a treatment was found that would, for lack of a better phrase, “wake up” the patients, though within weeks they’d slip back into their trance. If that all sounds like a familiar plotline, it’s perhaps because it was the inspiration for the Robin Williams’ fronted film Awakenings. But, we’re not here to talk about all the ways the past was the worst, else this video would end up being the longest ever posted on YouTube, even if we restricted ourselves to just the first 25 years of the 20th century. But rather, we’re going to zero in on a specific piece of that era, which will always be remembered as the century in which many of the most prominent nations on this planet decided to plunge our species into the most lethal, devastating, traumatic conflict since our ancestors had first pierced someone’s guts with the sharpened end of a stick. Not happy with just one such conflict, we went and did it twice, in the first place in The Great War, also known as ‘the war to end all of war’, and later simply as World War I when everyone realized that humans will seemingly never end warring until we have one so devastating that there are no humans left to war with. ... Author: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila 0:00 The Past was the Worst 7:45 The Truth About What Really Started WWI 14:05 King George V and Queen Mary 19:01 The Romanovs and The Windsors 22:40 Princess Mary 25:21 ‘David’, the Prince of Wales 29:01 Prince Albert 32:43 From WWI to WWII 35:38 How Everyone Gets "The Road Not Taken" Wrong and How It Helped End the Life it was Written About Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover the untold story of Hitler’s Jewish poster children, Hessy Levinsons and Werner Goldberg—icons of Nazi propaganda hiding shocking secrets. A compelling tale of irony, danger, and defiance. Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On July 20, 1969, the whole world gathered around their flickering television sets and watched in awe as astronaut Neil Armstrong who, if not for someone secretly slipping his very late application to the astronaut program into the pile wouldn’t have even been there (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), climbed down the leg of a strange, spidery vehicle, stepped onto the surface of the moon, and spoke the immortal words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” …Followed by the much less memorable second words, “I can – I can pick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine, sandy particles.” But for the first time in history, a human being had set foot on another world. The historic flight of Apollo 11 was the culmination of a massive eight-year effort to realize President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the road from the earth to the moon was far from a smooth one, beset by numerous hurdles and setbacks. For example, the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a launch pad fire on January 27, 1967 prompted a complete redesign of the Apollo spacecraft, while ongoing problems with the Saturn V rocket’s massive F-1 rocket engines nearly resulted in the cancellation of the entire Apollo programme. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all was deciding how to land on the moon in the first place. Solving this seemingly trivial question proved far more difficult than expected, requiring years of careful study and the heroic persistence of an obscure but determined engineer. This is the story of how we learned to land on the moon only a little over a half century after humans were still hitching up covered wagons to go places. Host: Simon Whistler Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Sponsor note:  Our listeners get 10% off their first month at ⁠⁠betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Sponsor note:  Our listeners get 10% off their first month at ⁠betterhelp.com/BrainFoodShow⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices