Chasing Shiny Things

A conversation with the author of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. If you've ever read anything about the history of psychedelics, the name Timothy Leary will probably sound familiar. He was a Harvard psychologist who r ...  Afficher plus

How did a covert chemical treatment permanently change our drinking water? In 1908, two men, John L. Leal and George Warren Fuller, spent 99 days secretly constructing something that would fundamentally alter the Jersey City water supply. Their decision to add chlorine is one tha ...  Afficher plus

Here's a philosophical question for you. If a color doesn't have a name, can we still see it? Many years ago, the human eye evolved to give us the ability to see about a million colors. That's a lot. Then how come, until very recently, nobody saw or even heard of the color blue? ...  Afficher plus

Were ancients color-blind? They weren’t but this idea has been passed around for centuries, usually by classicists confused by the Greeks’ odd choice of descriptive language. Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first ‘great’ poet of western civilization described the ...  Afficher plus

Blue is the most popular color in many parts of the world, and it can seem like it's everywhere. But many ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue, and some languages still don’t. This show was recorded live at a National Gallery of Art's NGA Nights event. Learn more about y ...  Afficher plus

Did you know blue was one of the last colors to be named? Discover the science behind how words shape our perception in this episode of Know Yourself. Find the full transcript of this episode and learn more about it on https://englishpluspodcast.com/the-curious-case-of-the-missin ...  Afficher plus