The BrainFood Show
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The BrainFood Show
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.
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157 ຕອນ
The Lord of Misrule and the First Book Banned in America
When one pictures the first British settlers coming to what would become the United States, it’s generally of a group of religiously oppressed, rigidl...
Are Poinsettias Poisonous and the Truce
In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at whether poinsettias are actually poisonous or not. Moving on to the main content to...
The Amazing Story Behind The Christmas Carol
In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we look at one of my favorite stories I’ve ever researched. But before that, we begin by looking at what coul...
The Incredible Flame Thrower Packing Insect
Nature abounds with weird and wonderful defence mechanisms, evolved over millions of years to protect their owners from predators and allow them to li...
Fires of Industry, Witchcraft, and the First Spark of the Revolution
When thinking about the various elements that went into the United States declaring Independence, we tend to think of things like the Stamp Act, The B...
Denazification and the Unsolved High Tech Murder That Reshaped Post-Cold War Europe
On the morning of November 30, 1989, a trio black Mercedes-Benz sedans pulled away from a house in the quiet Frankfurt suburb of Bad Homburg vor Der H...
How Do Spy Agencies Actually Recruit Spies in Real Life?
Agencies like the CIA and MI6 are tasked with collecting and processing data deemed potentially vital to their respective counties’ national interests...
The Kids Who Led the Resistance Movements Against the Nazis
History books often remember underground political groups like the Communist party or the Social Democrats, espionage groups like the Red Orchestra, o...
How Did People in Medieval Times Actually Siege a Castle in Reality
Modern entertainment such as movies, fictional books, and TV shows aren’t exactly known for accurately depicting how things may or may not go or have...
How Much Did Top Gun: Maverick Cost the U.S. Taxpayer?
Countless films produced in the United States feature use of rather expensive military equipment, and often also real world military personnel. Given...
What Did the German Public Know About the Holocaust During WWII?
While something like the holocaust isn’t exactly unprecedented in history, with mass genocide popping up an unnerving number of times the world over t...
Who Invented Nachos and the Potato Chip? Is the Green Part of the Potato Bad for You? And Much, Much More
In the episode today, Simon discusses who invented the potato chip, nachos, whether the green part of a potato is poisonous, and much, much more in th...
WTF are Smelling Salts?
It is a scene out of countless romance novels and prestige period pieces: an elegantly-dressed Victorian lady, laced too tightly into her corset, is s...
The Time a King Let the Leader of a Cult Become King to See if the World Would End
In today’s age of relatively stable international relations, it is hard to imagine the impact of something like the Mongol invasions. Starting in 1206...
Crazy Cool Science- What Causes This Sand to Sing?
Picture, if you will, a desert. Chances are, the picture you now have in your head probably looks a lot like Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia,...
Who Started the SS and How Did They Rise from a Handful of Men to Such Extreme Power?
Discover the origins and sinister evolution of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the infamous paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party, and how it grew to become one...
Who Invented the Band-Aid?
Finish the following sentence: “I am stuck on Band-Aid…” If you immediately sang: “…cuz Band-Aid’s stuck on me!”, congratulations: you have a 50-year...
The Crazy Carnival Ride Soviet Turntable Procedure That Gave Us the First Corrective Eye Surgery
The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. More practically, they are our windows to the world, humans being one of many visually-dependent spec...
Forgotten Hero- The Other Oskar Schindler
In 1993, legendary director Steven Spielberg released two groundbreaking films, which could not have been more different from one another. The first w...
Who Were the Real Life "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and What Did they Actually Do?
Among the many box office bombs of the 2024 movie season was The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Starring Superman himself - Henry Cavill - and dir...
Rebuilding Civilization, America's Most Mysterious Monument, and Blowing It Up
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 shatter...
The Horrifying World of Mind-Control Creatures
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...
Hollywood vs Reality: What Actually Happened During Apollo 13?
“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 o...
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire: The Extraordinary Saga of the Unsinkable Nevada
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 massiv...
The Great Vibrator Myth
Selfie stick. Electrical banana. Pocket pleaser. Magic wand. Divorce maker. Buzz Nightgear. Battery Operated Boyfriend. These are but a few colourful...
WTF is Up with the Swastika?
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...
The Insane Engineering of Atmospheric Diving Suits
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 th...
What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWII?
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 decide...
What Did the British Royals Get Up to During WWI?
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 ove...
Hitler’s “Ideal Aryans” Who Were Actually Jewish Ad Campaign
Discover the untold story of Hitler’s Jewish poster children, Hessy Levinsons and Werner Goldberg—icons of Nazi propaganda hiding shocking secrets. A...
How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon
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 some...
What's Up with Space Food?
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...
What is Up with the Van Allen Belts and How Did Astronauts Survive Flying Through Them?
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...
What was Hitler Like as a Child? And was His Grandfather Really Jewish?
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 proclai...
The Twisting, Turning Tale of the Invention of Dr Pepper
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 …...
So What Happens Exactly When Someone Wins the Lottery?
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...
The Weird, Wacky, and Hilarious World of Animal Mating
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 i...
The Forgotten First Major Public Nuclear Disaster
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 acc...
How Does Darth Vader Poop?
“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...
One of the Most Disastrous Naval Experiements of All Time
team-powered, gunned-up, and utterly cursed—cruiser submarines were meant to revolutionize naval warfare. Instead, they sank their own crews more ofte...