Ghosts and hauntings have been a part of the human experience for as long as there have been humans. But are they really spirits of dead people trapped on Earth? Or are there other explanations for ghostly phenomena?
Maybe you drink Four Loko and think you’re bad. But kids used to drink wine mixed with cocaine.
The strange history of cocaine and soft drinks, and how one of the most maligned drugs in the world became that way.
The Radium Girls, as they came to be known, were women who joined the United States war effort in World War 1, working in factories where they painted glow-in-the-dark paint on airplane instruments. It was considered a good job, until their bodies fell apart from radium poisoning.
Radium is a radioactive element discovered by Marie Curie in 1898, which initiated a bit of a radium craze until it was better understood to be very dangerous. Radium was used in the luminescent paint that the women handled every day in the factories, even ingesting the paint when they used their lips to contour the brushes.
Sadly, by the 1930s, most of the Radium Girls had died from cancers and bone degeneration, and their employer, the United States Radium Corporation, refused to take responsibility for their demise. This led to a rash of lawsuits that changed the way we treat workers, creating watchdog groups that have made workplaces safer all around the world.
Start listening with a 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook plus two Audible Originals for free. Visit http://www.audible.com/joescott or text “joe scott” to 500-500.
Alan Shepard entered the history books by being the first American in space. And while his launch was overshadowed by that of Yuri Gagarin – which beat his by only a few weeks – his career, talent, and legacy are nothing short of legendary.
Alan Shepard was one of the Mercury 7 astronauts along with Deke Slayton, Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter, John Glenn, Wally Shira, and Gordon Cooper. This was NASA’s first manned space program.
Alan’s mission was given the name Freedom 7 and he went up on a Mercury Redstone rocket. His flight was suborbital and only lasted 15 minutes, but started the US on the course for the moon.
But Alan Shepard’s early career started as a pilot in the Navy, where he ascended to become a test pilot, testing out the newest fighter jets and helping to decide which ones became part of the Navy’s arsenal.
After his Mercury flight, Shepard was grounded on account of Meniere’s Disease, which causes pressure in the inner ear and creates balance and orientation issues. But after corrective surgery, he was reinstated into the space program and served a commander on the Apollo 14 mission.
Lie detectors have been in use since the early 20th century, but they’ve been disputed since the very beginning. Here’s how to beat one.
At Tesla’s Investor Autonomy Day, they laid out their plan for building a self-driving network of robotaxis and made the argument that their computer vision approach is better than LiDAR-based approaches.
Here I take a look at the two strategies and see which one could be the first to create the self-driving car.
Buckminster Fuller wasn’t the massive success that he wanted to be, but he became a defining influence on the engineering, architecture, and design that shapes our world today.
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was designed to be a machine that works around you.
It featured some of the same design elements that made his famous geodesic domes so sturdy, plus it featured smart home features long before smart homes were a thing.
From sounds that literally damage your vocal cords to a language that’s entirely whistled, these are 5 of the strangest, quirkiest languages in the world.
The Piraha Language – Brazil This one is controversial because the theory is the language doesn’t have recursion. Recursion is a linguistic property where you can add phrases into phrases, also called Nesting. This is controversial because Noam Chomsky popularized the idea that recursions are a part of what he called “universal grammar” that you find in all languages.
And then Dr. Dan Everett studied the Piraha people of the Amazon rain forest in the 1970, first as a missionary and later just to research their language.
And in a paper in 2005, he claimed that the Piraha people do not use recursion, flying in the face of linguistic doctrine and shaking the very foundations of our knowledge to the ground, making international news.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/boo…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDM8G…
The Aymara language isn’t a small, tucked away language in some The reason it’s on this list is due to a little quirk that seems to be unique to the Aymara, which is the way they refer to the past and the future.
Why would they do that? The answer is a simple flip in perception, by saying that events from the past are known, meaning we can see them, they’re in front of us. Whereas the future is unknown, we can’t see it… So it’s behind us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydhT…
It’s no secret that there are languages in sub-Saharan Africa that use click sounds along with other consonant sounds, there are several of these but this one is the quintessential one.
It features 5 different click sounds and 17 accompanying ones. Also 4 vowel sounds with four varying tones.
This language is not just difficult to learn, it’s physically straining on a non-speaker because some of these clicks are next to impossible to do without a serious amount of training.
http://www.economist.com/node/15108609
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQpLv…
Guugu Yimithirr is an ancient language, spoken by the aboriginal people of Australia for thousands of years, specifically the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland, in fact it was actually the first aboriginal language ever written down by James Cook in 1770 and is where the word Kangaroo comes from.
All their directions used cardinal directions. Cardinal directions being North, South, East, West, and the directions in between. They didn’t have words for left, right, front or back.
What this means is that every speaker must always know what geographic direction they are facing at all times. It’s like the language has layered the geographic directions into the fabric of their culture. You literally can’t convey information without it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/mag…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF9RD…
La Gomera is an island, specifically the smallest of the Spanish Canary Islands just northwest of Africa. And on that tiny island is a language that’s not spoken anywhere else called Silbo Gomero, and it holds the top spot on this list for one simple reason. It’s spoken with whistles.
It’s literally like a whistled version of Spanish featuring two whistled vowels and four consonants.
It’s not that uncommon to find glowing animals in nature, this is called bioluminescence. But can people do this as well? Turns out… Sort of.
There was a time when traveling circuses and freak shows were the preeminent form of entertainment of the day. Some people made a great living as human oddities, showing off their natural (and unnatural) bodies. Here are 10 of the most famous.
Solving The Mystery Of The Somerton Man With Professor Derek Abbott – Episode 22
If “The Universe Isn’t Real…” Then What Is It?
The Harpe Brothers: America’s First Serial Killers
This Company Wants To Build Offices In Space
Designing The Most Efficient Car In The World With Chris Anthony, CEO of Aptera – Episode 21
