pplpod

Paul Dirac was so quiet that his Cambridge colleagues invented a unit of measurement — the "dirac," defined as one word per hour. But behind that legendary silence was one of the most powerful minds i...

14 Jun 22min

Louis Pasteur is revered as one of the greatest scientists in history — the father of germ theory, the inventor of pasteurization, the creator of vaccines for rabies and anthrax. But when historians f...

14 Jun 23min

Charles Darwin dropped out of medical school because the sight of blood made him faint, nearly became a country parson, and spent five years on HMS Beagle vomiting over the rail from chronic seasickne...

14 Jun 23min

Robert Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, then watched it destroy two Japanese cities and spent the rest of his life haunted by what he had created. When he opposed the ...

14 Jun 24min

Epicurus is remembered as the philosopher of pleasure — and almost everything the modern world thinks it knows about his philosophy is wrong. He did not advocate luxury, gluttony, or hedonistic excess...

14 Jun 22min

Marie Curie discovered two elements, won two Nobel Prizes in different sciences, and pioneered the use of mobile X-ray units on World War I battlefields. She also carried radioactive isotopes in her p...

14 Jun 23min

The Art of War is the most quoted military text in history — cited by generals, CEOs, and football coaches for twenty-five centuries. But its supposed author, Sun Tzu, may never have existed. Ancient ...

14 Jun 24min

When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Sigmund Freud was an elderly, cancer-ridden Jewish intellectual trapped in Vienna — exactly the kind of person the Third Reich was determined to destroy. His es...

14 Jun 23min