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Otokichi’s Long Trip Home 9 Aug 2013 | 06:19 am
Listen to this episode While most of the major powers of western Europe spent the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries racing around the world carving out empires for themselves, Japan felt threatened by t...
The Lincoln assassination conspirators, July 7, 1865 23 Jul 2013 | 08:45 pm
One of the hooded figures is Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the US federal government. Her last words were, "Please don't let me fall."
The Conductor 12 Jul 2013 | 06:44 pm
Roy Sullivan was a ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, USA. He became famous for unwittingly shattering a rather unenviable world record. This newer, shorter, experimentaler podcast episod...
Andrée and the Aeronauts' Voyage to the Top of the World 24 Jun 2013 | 07:30 pm
On the 11th of July 1897, the world breathlessly awaited word from the small Norwegian island of Danskøya in the Arctic Sea. Three gallant Swedish scientists stationed there were about to embark on an...
The Mole Rat Prophecies 21 Apr 2013 | 12:36 pm
The naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, is fleshy, furless, buck-toothed and brazenly ugly. Yet what these small East African rodents lack in terms of good looks, they make up with an impressive ar...
The Spy Who Loved Nothing 19 Feb 2013 | 08:29 am
The meeting had not gone well, the man gloomily reflected as he was driven out of East Berlin. His head was still heavy after a few too many snifters of cognac. The American's ambitious scheme to buil...
The Isle of Doctor Seaborg 29 Jan 2013 | 06:56 am
It was the summer of 1936 when Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the atom-smashing cyclotron, received a visit from Emilio Segrè, a scientific colleague from Italy. Segrè explained that he had come all...
The Arizona Dragonslayer 7 Dec 2012 | 06:36 am
A simple telegram plunged America into the Great War. The Zimmermann telegram, intercepted by American intelligence in April 1917, revealed Germany’s efforts to encourage Mexico to invade the United S...
The Science of Mental Fitness 13 Nov 2012 | 06:00 pm
It’s a testament to the strength and versatility of the human brain that anyone with at least half of one tends to assume that their senses give them direct access to objective reality. The truth is l...
Nineteen Seventy Three 19 Oct 2012 | 12:34 pm
On 12 November 1971, in the presidential palace in the Republic of Chile, President Salvador Allende and a British theorist named Stafford Beer engaged in a highly improbable conversation. Beer was a ...
