Tag: history

• Houdini Birds and the Space Dagger

  Researchers in Australia have been trying to track magpies using tiny, featherweight transmitters, but the birds have banded together to escape the magnetic backpacks that house the signal. This kind of cooperation has never been observed among this species and it raises a whole bunch of new questions. Anthony and Jeff take a look at those wily birds, and what this could mean for their incessant pranks. Then, new analysis of a dagger found in King Tut's tomb reveal that it is made out of iron from a meteorite. Jeff and Anthony step through the incredible process used to make that discovery. [more]

  March 15, 2022Episodes

• Polyphasic Spree (Live From PAX East 2018)

  Around a third of the population have trouble maintaining sleep throughout the night. While nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, there is some evidence from our recent past that suggests this period of wakefulness occurring between two separate sleep periods was the norm. Throughout history, there have been numerous accounts of segmented sleep, with a common reference to "first" and "second" sleep. Jeff and Anthony hope you can make it all the way through this episode. Recorded live in Boston at PAX East 2018. [more]

  April 9, 2018Episodes

• Big Haply Family

  IN THE LAST 20 years, genealogy websites have attracted more than 15 million customers by promising insights into your past. It’s deeply personal, affecting stuff. But when your family tree contains thousands, millions, even tens of millions of people, it’s no longer a personal history. It’s human history. Recently, scientists from the New York Genome Center, Columbia, MIT, and Harvard scraped crowdsourced public records into family trees the size of small nations. Their analysis, which was published today in Science, includes the single largest known family tree, containing 13 million people. Your cousins Jeff and Anthony discuss this story. [more]

  March 21, 2018Episodes