In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater, with a species of snake that ...Show more
Song of the Cerebellum
One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit of it out, assuring her it was ...Show more
Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us. What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a world they nev ...Show more
Over 100 years of conflict, two warring nations, five monarchs on either side and countless casualties in a dispute over claims to the throne: in this episode, Gone Medieval's Matt Le ...Show more
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea of a just war. There were theories about a justified or noble war before the birth of Christ, but it was his reported teachings and a powerful influence, particularly on the Emperor Constantine, which set the standard which had to be kept ...Show more
The history of the English Language: 1066 is the most important date in the history of English. Why does English have a "double vocabulary system"? Why do some words feel casual, while others feel formal? Why is English spelling so confusing? The answers to those questions ca ...Show more