Turtle Soup, Part 1: A Delicacy of Yesteryear

NASCAR! This thoroughly American racing organization is huge in the United States -- and has a lot of international gearhead fans, as well. However, as Ben, Noel and Max discover in today's episode, this multibillion-dollar industry has a fascinating, ridiculous, and criminal pas ...  Show more

For a lot grade-school kids in the States, the story of Johnny Appleseed is a modern American myth. The story centers on a quixotic, wandering nomad that (for some reason) is cartoonishly centered on planting apple trees all throughout the newly-minted US. So... how much of this ...  Show more

It seems obvious that turtles' shells would have evolved to protect them from predators, but researchers have found that they probably first evolved to help turtles dig. Learn what that's all about in this classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://animals.hows ...  Show more

We're bringing back one shell of an episode with today's encore. What's a tortoise? What's a turtle? Why do they live so dang long? What's up with their junk? Wildlife biologist and testudinologist Amanda Hipps studies gopher tortoises and dishes about turtle nomenclature, cli ...

Stephen Hawking starts A Brief History of Time with an anecdote he attributes to Bertrand Russel who, having just finished a lecture on the heliocentric nature of the planets’ orbits, was challenged by a lady in the audience.“What you have told us is rubbish.” She said, “The worl ...  Show more

Little-known fact: Ketchup, possibly the most all-American of condiments, evolved from fermented fish sauce people in Southeast Asia have been making for more than a thousand years. Learn more in this classic episode.