JOJOs asks: I think we all want to know right now- what did people use to wipe before toilet paper? The first references of people using toilet paper dates back to the 6th century AD in the Chinese Imperial courts and amongst the other wealthy citizens of China. This eventually spread throughout China and by the 14th century there was […]
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Anakin_bagel asks: What was the daily life of a medieval knight like? 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 […]
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When the Nazis steamrolled into the Netherlands in May of 1940, Jannetje Johanna “Hannie” Schaft and Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were just 19, 16, and 14 years old respectively. As for the Oversteegen sisters, their mother, Trijn, had left their father years before. Freddie states of this, “She was just fed up one day—we lived on a large ship in […]
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silentrob asks: Is it true that beards grow faster in the winter than they do in the summer? A commonly touted notion is that your hair will grow faster, be thicker, and otherwise naturally longer in the winter time thanks to the supposed evolutionary benefit to help keep you warm in the colder months. But is this actually true? And […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we are looking at the difference between a number of things, kicking it off with the difference between hardwood and softwood…. which you’d think you already know, but we’re guessing for most, you don’t actually know the difference. 🙂 We also have a brief message from a sponsor, Skillshare. Help support this show […]
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If you’ve spent virtually any time on the interwebs, and particularly lurked in the social media areas of this marvel of human ingenuity, you’ll no doubt at one point or another come across the fact that many women have living male cells hanging out in their bodies, including in their brains. The most common explanation, according to social media, for […]
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BaKlol asks: Where did the word fuck come from? In its various incarnations, the F-word can be a noun, verb, adjective, and even an infix. The Swiss Army Knife of the English language, this word has been adding spice to our conversations for centuries, even if our forbears were loathe to write it down. So where did it come from? […]
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When looking at a list of most watched videos on youtube, you’ll find the vast majority in the “hundreds of millions of views” club are various music videos. In the top 10, you’ll see a variety of household names like Ed Sheeran with 4.6 billion views on his Shape of You music video, Justin Bieber’s Sorry with 3.2 billion, and […]
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The first known instances of humans noticing that we could affect the weather in some way by industrial-type action go all the way back to around the 4th century BC and one Theophrastus. Along with extensive observations about how climate and weather in a given region seems to affect plant life, he also noted how man could change the climate. […]
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Japanadian asks: How do conjugal visits work in real life? While in the last couple decades in the United States, various states have rapidly been putting an end to so-called conjugal visits, it turns out their benefit to prisoners, wardens, and the general public are surprisingly high, including in the long run saving enormous sums of money for John Q. […]
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el_juano asks: Is it possible for someone to get infected with cancer from someone else? In an oversimplified nutshell, cancer is, to quote cancer.gov, a disease “in which abnormal cells divide without control and can invade nearby tissues.” Given its propensity to spread and divide in an uncontrolled manner throughout a person’s body, it brings up the question of whether […]
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In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start by looking at the first woman in the United States to cast a political vote who for reasons we’ll get into did it with her feet… We also have a brief message from a sponsor, Skillshare. Help support this show and learn a lot of interesting new skills, as well as […]
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Johnny Pope asks: Why do people on death row get whatever meal they want right before they die? If you happen to ever find yourself slated to have society as a whole decide it would be best if they killed you, the silver lining is that in many parts of the world where this is still a thing, the last […]
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Some of the first stories humans ever deemed worthy of writing down inevitably included tales of a man or men rushing to the aid of some damsel in distress, from Perseus rescuing Andromeda, to the Achaeans assembling to go rescue, or at least reclaim, Helen. As the centuries passed, this basic theme has never gone out of style, even still […]
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MasaC asks: Why do fingernails on a chalkboard make us cringe? Few sounds cause humans to cringe more than nails across a chalkboard, a fork scraped on a plate, or a heavy metal chair dragged across a tiled floor. But what exactly is it about this sort of scraping noise that is so offensive to our brains that many even […]
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The origin of the keyboard starts, unsurprisingly with the first typewriters. There were a variety of type-writer-like devices around going back the 18th century, before one Christopher Latham Sholes, with some help from a few other guys, came up with one that would become the first commercially successful typewriter in the 1870s. Much like many typewriters since, Shole’s device used […]
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Milesperawesome asks: Could you get in trouble legally if you murdered someone in space? Asking for a friend. While it might seem like something out of science fiction, given that humans are presently in space and soon enough mass space tourism is going to open up the possibility for many, many more, it’s only a matter of time before someone […]
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Nohomers asks: Can police officers actually commandeer your vehicle like in movies? Inevitably in any film that has some member of law enforcement as the protagonist at some point said individual will wave their badge, and potentially their gun, at a passing car and demand to commandeer the vehicle. But if you’re ever driving along and some police officer does […]
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