The BrainFood Show

It is the ultimate vision of the end times: a gargantuan, roiling column of orange flame and black smoke towering into the sky, with its top a massive ball, forming something of a mushroom shape. But have you ever wondered why atomic bombs produce such distinctively-shaped explosions, or what a nuclear detonation would look like underwater, underground, or even in outer space or the surface of the moon? It turns out in each environment, the result of the explosion is extremely different, in some surprising ways, especially when it comes to what happens when a nuke explodes in space, with this result being almost certainly not what most think, and definitely not what Hollywood ever depicts.

So grab your Geiger counter, radiation suit, and a tasty survival ration, as we dive into the fascinating physics of nuclear explosions, and then use all that knowledge to definitively answer the question- just what would a nuclear blast in space, and on the moon, look like.

0:00 Intro
2:35 What Causes the Mushroom Cloud When on Earth and Other Lesser Known Unique Effects of Nuclear Blasts
10:09 What Happens When you Detonate a Nuke Under Ground or Under Water and the Interesting Differences from Atmospheric Detonations?
17:29 What Happens When You Detonate a Nuke in Space?
23:22 What Would Happen if You Detonated a Nuke on the Moon
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Almost everyone has seen depicted the bizarre bachelor party tradition of a scantily-clad woman jumping out of a giant cake. It turns up most often in decades-old films, TV shows, and comics, but it still persists today at lavish Vegas shindigs—though the cakes are now usually made of flimsy cardboard. But how did this tradition actually start? Well, it turns out it was a murder and the "Trial of the Century" that made the practice spread. Here now is the dark story of how it all began.

Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 Intro
1:28 How the Practice of Putting Living Things in Food Got Started
5:41 The Girl in the Pie Dinner and the Murder That Followed
9:45 The Incredible Tale of the Dwarf Knight and the Duel That Ruined His Life
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Hand based games have been around seemingly as long as humans have been humaning. As to the exact genesis of Rock, Paper, Scissors, however, this appears to originate in hand games from China, supposedly going back about two thousand years, though primary documented evidence of this is scant. That said, the trail gets much more clear starting around the 17th century which saw some of these games having migrated over to Japan and explicit references to them in surviving text. One of those games, in turn, spread from Japan throughout the world in surprisingly recent times. We are, of course, referring to Rock, Paper, Scissors.

As noted, in the early going, there were a myriad of these hand games using a series of hand gestures, sometimes even using various chants. As for the many three hand gesture variants, these are called sansukumi-ken.

As an example of one variant of this, we have the Japanese “mushi-ken” which instead of using Rock, Paper, and Scissors, used hand gestures representing a frog, a slug, and a snake. The specific gestures were the thumb as the frog, which defeats the slug. The slug is represented by the pinky finger and defeats the snake. The snake is represented by the index finger and defeats the frog.

If you're now wondering how a snake is beaten by a slug in the Japanese version, it's hypothesized that when the Japanese adopted the game from the Chinese, they simply misinterpreted the character for a certain poisonous centipede used in said Chinese version, with that then representing the slug in Japan because of it.

0:00 Who Invented Rock, Paper, Scissors and What's the Best Way to Win Consistently?
10:27 Who Invented Chewing Gum?
18:22 Who Invented the Food Pyramid and Why You'd Be Crazy to Follow It
27:40 Who Invented the Pencil Sharpener?
33:34 Who Invented the Hot Air Balloon?
44:14 Who Invented the Taser?
50:07 Who Invented Jeans?
58:20 Who Invented Nachos and Why are They Called That?
1:07:36 Who Invented Hawaiian Pizza?
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*Just an addendum to one of the tangents I forgot to mention- pulling up like crazy in a plane while rapidly hurtling towards the ground is a phenomenal way to ensure the wings of the plane cease to remain attached to it.

In this episode of The Brain Food Show, we start off looking at the little known much more massive big brother to the Roman Colosseum and the astounding number of people it held.

Moving on to the main topic, we are looking at how it came to be that some countries have their populaces drive on the left while others choose the keep right model. In the Bonus Facts, we look at some interesting things about the keep left and keep right rules with regards to boats, airplanes and helicopters.
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Conceived in early 1990, the MagiCan campaign was supposed to be the spearhead of a massive summer promotion the cola giant dubbed “Magic Summer ’90”. In a nutshell, the promotion involved hiding cash prizes ranging from $5-$500, as well as some other goodies such as coupons for free Coke, inside of 750,000 of the several hundred million cans of Coke that would be distributed during the summer.

As part of the campaign, Coke created (and patented) a unique mechanism that, as soon as the can was opened, would eject the prize inside via a spring loaded mechanism. Coke dubbed the cans “MagiCans”.

In order to ensure people didn’t end up with water-logged prizes, the part of the can containing the aforementioned mechanism was sealed off and the reservoir that was left was filled with chlorinated water to make the weight of the can approximately the same as a normal full can of Coca-Cola.
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