- Publisher |
- Sam Kean
- Media Type |
- audio
- Podknife tags |
- History,
- Science & Medicine,
- Society & Culture
A topsy-turvy science-y history podcast by Sam Kean. I examine overlooked stories from our past: the dental superiority of hunter-gatherers, the crooked Nazis who saved thousands of American lives, the American immigrants who developed the most successful cancer screening tool in history, the sex lives of dinosaurs, and much, much more. These are charming little tales that never made the history books, but these small moments can be surprisingly powerful. These are the cases where history gets inverted, where the footnote becomes the real story.
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Submit ReviewAn update on the spring season of Disappearing Spoon (early episodes for Patreon subscribers!), plus a trailer for the new "Innate" series from the great people behind the Science History Institute's "Distillations podcast"
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe “mouse utopia” experiment showed just how quickly animal heaven can turn into animal hell—and revealed how eager human beings are to interpret science through the lens of extremist politics...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyPolar explorer Douglas Mawson made several mistakes on his harrowing journey across Antarctica. But the biggest blunder involved eating animal livers oversaturated with vitamin A, a sure death sentence...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyAutomobiles kill several million animals every single day. Scientists are still coming to grips with the carnage...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThomas Schall was first blind member of Congress. There, he envisioned a better, smarter, more efficient world—brought about by his radical new calendar. Too bad the rest of us couldn’t see the future as clearly as he did...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea is a place of guns and heartache and anger—and also one of the most thriving natural wildlife habitats on Earth...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyNaked mole-rats are medical marvels—impervious to cancer and immune to old age. Too bad they’re also vicious murderers...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe Johnny Appleseed of Disney fame was complete bunk. He brought not wholesome apples to people, but liquor—and lots of it, all thanks to the bizarre biology of this misunderstood fruit...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyIt fueled slavery, as well as the Nazi death machine. It kills millions of people every year through cancer and heart disease. And you almost certainly have some in your home. That’s the legacy of sugar...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyWarfarin was the best rat poison in history. It’s also, now, one of the most important, life-saving—and freakishly unlikely—drugs in the history of medicine...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyDr. Walter Freeman blamed himself for the death of his favorite son. But instead of reflecting or growing personally, he used that death to become the most notorious lobotomist in the history of medicine...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyA bonus excerpt from my book The Icepick Surgeon on the making of the Unabomber, through a cruel, unethical psychology experiment at Harvard University...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyLike Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer before him, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was a legendary pioneer in both art and science. He was also a cold-blooded murderer.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyCharles Byrne was an eight-foot Irish giant ️who loved a beer or 3 with the lads. His funeral became a legendary party—as well as one of biggest scandals in science history, when a famous anatomist named John Hunter stole his body for dissection.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe New York Times one credited biologist Edward Knipling with “the most original idea of the 20th century.” What was it? A way to fight the screwworm, the vilest parasite on earth—and maybe stop malaria, the deadliest disease in human history, too.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyWhat a strange little sparrow can teach us about love, sex, human biology, and a whole lot more...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyCan we ever truly lie to ourselves? Actually, yes—just ask Woodrow Wilson and William O. Douglas. They’re two famous examples of a bizarrely common neurological disorder. One that you might have fallen victim to yourself...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyIn 1971, Stephen Hawking made a hasty, emotional mistake in a paper about black holes—and it turned out to be the smartest thing he ever did. Sometimes in science, big blunders are the best way forward...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyAlbert Einstein’s self-proclaimed “biggest blunder”—the cosmological constant in his theory of relativity—turned out to not be blunder at all. In fact, it might hold the key to the future of physics. (Now that’s genius!)
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyYou think Isaac Newton was smart? Not so fast. He made one mistake so dumb that scholars still shake their heads over it. Find out how to avoid this mistake—and be smarter than Newton—in this episode...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyWhen Impressionist painter Claude Monet developed cataracts, he thought his painting career was over. Hardly. He actually developed a human superpower—the ability to see, like bees do, a much wider range of colors...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyCharles Darwin didn’t give a crap about Galápagos finches, despite what you maybe heard. So what animals did light his fire while forming his theory of evolution? Pigeons, worms, and especially a despised marine pest—the lowly barnacle...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a simple operation—castrating little boys—produced the greatest singers the world has ever known...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a bloody gun duel between two doctors in Transylvania sparked a frenzy of outrage—as well as the American Medical Association...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a feisty, suicidal Nobel laureate infuriated both Hitler and Stalin, and stalled cancer research for fifty years along the way...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyIn a building full of dead bodies, how can you tell a murder victim from an unlucky stiff?
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe world’s first plastic made Hollywood possible—and killed thousands of people along the way...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a steam-powered automobile in 1869 snuffed out the life of the brilliant female naturalist and astronomer Mary Ward...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyWhat a bizarre psychological disorder can teach us about memory, human nature, and our sense of who we are
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyScientists know how other animals’ bodies will change in warmer climates, but how will human beings respond?
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe life of chimneysweeps was nasty, poor, brutish, filthy dirty, and usually short, thanks to a rare cancer of the genitals...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe long, wacky, and surprisingly thought-provoking history of trying animals in human courts...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThe prologue and introduction to the book The Icepick Surgeon. Written by Sam Kean, read by Ben Sullivan.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow early anatomists provoked some of the strangest riots in history, over stolen corpses (plus, bonus preview of my new book, The Icepick Surgeon!)
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a rogue archaeologist in Peru—and a stolen skull—provided the first real evidence that ancient people practiced neurosurgery...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow one doctor in the early 1900s risked the lives of patients by pitting one ancient scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis)—and won a Nobel Prize in the process...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow greed, and a group of Nazi prisoners, killed off one of the most iconic birds in American history, the ivory-billed woodpecker...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a weird “scientific” diet fad conquered America in the early 1900s—and easily could have lost World War One for the Allies...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow the unique properties of carbon produced a 1,185-letter word...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow a bottle of prison hooch doomed the most promising candidate in history for a male birth-control pill, and why scientists still can't make one today...
https://www.patreon.com/disappearingspoon
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyA two-fer: (1) A bonus interview with me about the orphan vaccine episode, from a great WNYC podcast called Science Diction. (2) A short episode of Science Diction on Edward Jenner and the very first vaccines.
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow the women of America, exactly 100 years ago, scrimped and saved and sacrificed to secure a vital gram of radium for their scientific hero, Marie Curie...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow the legendary Peking Man fossils from China disappeared in the 1940s, and why archaeologists think that maybe—just maybe—they now know where to find them...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyHow did they spread vaccines around the world in the early 1800s? By injecting orphans and forcing them onto a ship...
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacyThis podcast could use a review! Have anything to say about it? Share your thoughts using the button below.
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