The Necessity of Patient Zero
Patient zero looms large in our collective consciousness. Through carelessness, impropriety or sheer twisted luck, they introduce highly contagious pathogens into new human populations -- if not the h...
14 Mar 201755min
Life After Radiation: Sickness, Death and Sustenance
While fictional monsters and superheroes consume rads like video game power-ups, radiation is a trickier matter in reality -- from everyday radiation to the destructive exposure associated with nuclea...
9 Mar 20171h 5min
One-Armed Bandits: The Science of Slot Machines
You may call it a slot machine, a fruit machine or a one-armed bandit, but the reality is the same: an algorithmically precise machine designed to drain the human gambler of all his or her earnings. W...
7 Mar 20171h 1min
Mandala: Memory Palace and Simulated Worlds
The mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism entice us as artistic expressions, meta symbols and conscience expressions of a complex spiritual cosmology. In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Ro...
2 Mar 201748min
Books of Flesh: Anthropodermic Bibliopegy
The libraries of horror fiction typically offer many a dark tome bound in human flesh, but do books like the ‘Necronomicon Ex-Mortis’ of ‘Evil Dead’ really exist? They do, and the true story of skin-c...
28 Feb 201757min
The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 2
In the second of two episodes, Christian and Joe continue their discussion of animal cognition, including animal morality, tool use, mental time travel, culture, and other strange clues to the intelle...
23 Feb 20171h 16min
The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 1
In the 18th century, David Hume wrote that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.” Yet animal cognition has remained a controversial ...
21 Feb 20171h 5min
The Holy Black Stone of Mecca
The Kaaba marks the geographic center of the Islamic world, and here one finds Al-Hadjar Al-Aswad, the Holy Black Stone of Mecca. Islamic traditions hold that the once white white stone blackened with...
16 Feb 20171h 14min
