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Maximum Fun

Science communicators Ella Hubber, Tom Lum, and Caroline Roper learn about anything and everything interesting! Each episode they teach each other about a science topic, and learn about a miscellaneous topic. Whether it's bugs on drugs, temporal illusions, or fanfiction, there's so much out there, so let's learn everything! Join our Discord, email us, and follow us everywhere at www.LetsLearnEverything.com

Let's Learn Everything!

It's the HaLearn Days!! We've gathered a whole bunch of fun facts from each other and from friends of the show to share the gift of laughter and learning!

Images we Talk About:
The Rat Car
Rat Car Video

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Join our Discord!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:57) Part 1
(00:59:11) Part 2
(01:37:06) Outro 

We also learn about: The Christmas Brussel Sprout Tradition, put christ back in halearn days, Where the Dog Ran, eclipses are more of a “huh?” moment, you might hear a frog during an eclipse - or more likely a science communicator, the turkey helicopter truth is stranger than fiction, giraffes can’t walk up anything steeper than 20 degrees, topography is important for giraffe reserves, the emu wars, Anatidaephobia, gotta define intimate, I eat and talk with tongue, our most liked tweet was from a jetlag hat, there’s nothing in the rules that says a wormhole can’t exist and a dog can’t play basketball, we got a rejection on our preprint from St Nicholas, Michel Foucault’s Elf on a Shelf, the scale of believability, when we stopped believing in santa, “Santa knows I can’t speak german”, the child psychology of Santa, William Shatner’s Halloween mask, Sleierton’s Betty Boop ghost mask, Tom finds out he’s driving a rat experiment car, the yuletide tradition of rats, rats would rather drive longer route to get food, alright “Tom Lum”, rice crispies and taco sauce, bingo bingo prison industrial complex! it’s very human to want to have tasty food, the places I would least like to have taste receptors, taste receptors and buds are different, we just discovered them on our tongues first and called them taste receptors, really our tongue has testicle and urethra receptors, screen-based phones, electronic purgatory, we will all get old, and as we say on the podcast: every year another vagina, should all our fun facts be forgot and never brought to mind, we’ll raise a cup of kindness yet, for everything.

Sources:
Minute Physics video on Animals during Eclipses
Frog Song During Eclipse Study
Wikipedia: WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away”
Why Can’t Domesticated Turkeys Fly?
Eureka Alert: Giraffes Struggle with Slopes
The Emu War
Scientific American: 80 million microbes in a Kiss
Microbiome Journal: Kiss study
Nature News: Shared Microbiome
AIP Wormhole Definition & Paper
Astronomy Today on Wormholes
2024 Paper: Children’s Belief in Santa Claus and Moral Behavior
Snopes on Michael Myers Mask
Snopes on Scream Mask
William Shatner interview Entertainment Weekly
Independant: Scientists Taught Rats to Drive
BBC: Rats Taught to Drive Tiny Cars to Lower Their Stress Levels
2020 Paper: Enriched environment exposure accelerates rodent driving skills
Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years
NPR: Ramen Noodle Currency
2013 Paper: Taste perception: From The Tongue To The Testis
NIH In Brief: How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?
1992 NYTimes Article about Cell Phones
CBC Article on the First Text Message

76: The HaLearnDays Spectacular! 2024

It's the start of the new year which means a bunch of new questions submitted by YOU! What are our favorite words from the podcast? What's it like to scrap a topic? Would we still love each other if we were worms?

Things we Talk About:
Contrapoints' Twilight Video
Jenny Nicholson's Star Wars Hotel Video
Shaun's Channel
China's Artifical Sun
XOXO 2024 Videos

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:42) Part 1
(01:13:53) Part 2
(01:54:30) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: west our weawy heads, this year we had long topics and a good spread of topics, Jono’s Q&A themes 2.0, next year I’m doing a topic on Caroline, we can neither confirm nor deny it’s the dex we know, Challengers Zone of Interest is the new Barbenheimer, games that show your personality, ahh eating your own poop has been on my list for forever, the use of pseudoscience, Caroline’s favorite word from the podcast is Quantum thanks to Tom (awww), Tom’s favorite is Kleptoparasitism, just “Light” as a topic, can we sweep Ella off her math’s feet, say hi to us! we clicked with Gretchen TOO well, the format change has been great! someone thought that with the format change one person would just not be there, next year one topic - then zero - then negative topics, Ella’s super secret question section, Head and Shoulders made these lovely locks, being non binary, Ella still collects squashed pennies, learning outside the podcast, you are a clown, actually it turns out we don’t need comedy in this show - huh, tiktok is like matches and podcast are logs, tiktok vs youtube vs podcasts, oh people are listening to this, waiting for the other fun to drop, how we resolved learning everything, 2026 is gonna be a banging year, Ella’s 2 Star review of the year.

New Year Q&A 2024/25

As we plan out the new year, please enjoy a recast of one of my (Tom's) favorite guest appearances on Spellbound and Gagged, hosted by the wonderful friend of the show Ellen Weatherford!

Recast: The Funcanny Valley - Spellbound and Gagged

What can we learn from the most modern - but overlooked form of pollution? And can mistakes in art be something actually... good?

Images we Talk About:
Navajo Rug Ch'ihónít’i
Ramses II Statue
Ecce Homo
The Original Ecce Homo
3 Versions of Ecce Homo
Lincoln Memorial Mistake

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:25) Light Pollution
(00:48:06) Mistaeks
(01:37:02) Outro

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Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Auctioning topics, the origins of pollution, pollution is old but light pollution is from the 1960s, the great stink, the biggest light polluter is the sun, old gas street lights used to be more like beacons than lights, the world’s getting 10% brighter each year, 80% of North American can’t see the milky way, Light Trespass, Sky Glow, light pollution makes telescopes worse, Tom’s parents hearing him scream WHY IS THERE BREAST MILK, the strange lights after the 1994 LA earthquake, amateur astronomers are vital to astronomy, light trapped moths, a 1917 study on lighthouses and bird migration, birds waking up 5 hours earlier, turtles also use moonlight navigation, just move your telescope and evolve your species it’s not our fault, “he glistens you philistine”, the big beautiful glow worm woman in the sky, street lights are like sugar light to plants, light pollution isn’t the biggest issue - but that can make it easy to ignore - and it has some easy wins! it’s solvable at the community level, Tom’s buoyancy broken hand mistake, oops I mixed up my therapy and podcast topic list, the beatles anomalies list, Michelangelo’s beautiful complaint letter poem, we are our own worst critic, the ASMR mistake was just an anomaly, Kintsugi, “it treats breakage as a part of the object’s history rather than an error or a failure to be covered up”, what’s the japanese word for mud covered boots, only god can make perfect fun facts, Ch'ihónít’i, releasing the thoughts from an object - a way out, the journey of Caroline’s darned jumper, how can you tell an old mistake was a mistake? hieroglyphic typos, oh shit control ankh control ankh, revealing an ancient mistake by mistake, Philadelphia isn’t real it can’t hurt you, the Jesus that was… made an anomaly by Gloria Gimenez, the misremembered story of Ecce Homo, art is this emotional roller coaster, wow don’t take Tom’s summary Caroline, Lincoln memorial myths, 1000 years from now a museum in Neo Egypt will carve out the lincoln memorial fix, I know a great art restoration person in spain if you need one, most mistakes are just forgotten, you need mistakes to learn, the mistake of starting this podcast, verbal kintsugi, anomalous jesus, we didn’t learn today that Ella was a contrarian.

Sources:

Britannica: Light Pollution
2020 Paper: A Chronology of Global Air Quality
Wikipedia: The Great Stink
NHM London: Increasing Light Pollution is Drowning out the Stars
2023 Paper: Light Pollution is Skyrocketing
Scientific America: Light Pollution is Dimming Our View of the Sky
2009 Paper: Missing the Dark: Health Effects of Light Pollution
National Parks Service: Connect with the Galaxy: A case for turning out the lights
CAPE 2023: What are the Effects of Artifical Light on Human Health? An Evidence Brief 
2019 Paper: Effects of Light at Night on Laboratory Animals and Research Outcomes
1918 Paper: The Destruction of Birds at the Lighthouses on the Coast of California
2021 Paper: Characteristics of Light Pollution – A case study of Warsaw (Poland) and Fukuoka (Japan)
1973 Paper: Light Pollution 
BBC: How light pollution disrupts plants' senses
Dark Sky: Solutions to Light Pollution

---

The Beatles Anomalies List
Michelangelo's "Poem"
Kintsugi
Jill Ahlberg Yohe's Incredible Paper on Ch’ihónít’i
Penn Museum's Ramses II
Ancient Egyptian Literacy
NYTimes on Ecce Homo
The Guardian Ecce Homo Critique
The Art History of Ecce Homo
AP on Ecce Homo a Year Later

77: Light Pollution & Mistaeks

Why is the common fruit fly the perfect model organism, and the reason for 6 Nobel Prizes?? And what is the british fascination around the meal deal, lunchtime, and the sandwich?

Images we Talk About:

Map of the Fruit Fly Brain
Rat My Meal Deal
The Sandwich Factory

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:57) Drosophila Melanogaster
(00:49:46) The British Meal Deal
(01:37:48) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: Ella’s former favorite fun fact, are 6 nobel prizes more impressive than long sperm? we need to pause, bolas, Ella’s Virgins, Dew Loving Black Belly, Dros Mel are human commensals - they migrated with us, “they’re undemanding guests”, first life intentionally put into space, maybe Jeff Goldblum became a fly so seamlessly because they share 60% of their DNA, Tom’s great Jeff Goldblum impression, they share a lot of disease related genes, Thomas Morgan - The Lord of the Flies, Morgan knew about genetics but not DNA yet, genetic redundancy, a fly geneticist’s swiss army knife, the varied list of nobel wins, are they cancelled? wait actually? guess that fly gene, “the inside jokes are becoming outside jokes”, the golden wild west era of the fruit fly may be over - but not all science, the beautiful fruit fly brain, we COULD end by talking about how this little organism has been so belovedly studied and helpful, Dros Mel has a mini bachelorette organ, the great british everything, is this a sincere answer? rating meal deals, fluctuations of lunch elitism, a beaver and a noonshine, capitalism made workers hours longer - workers rights made lunch, lunch was given by and for women, the earl of sandwich was too much of a gamer, we can’t re-litigate the cube rule, the “daring” true story of the sandwich, the sandwich storry isn’t about invention it’s about class, food elitism fads, ella invents soup in a tube, 1980s the first pre-packaged sandwich, units of sandwich (UOS), it’s almost like getting separated from the means of production…, the british sandwich association, take your lunch break! you won’t remember doing an extra bit of work - you’ll remember spending time with folks and making a bomb ass sandwich, short lunch breaks make meal deals make sense, drosophola and meal deals cancelled on this episode,

Sources:
Paper: Drosophila - Model Organism of Choice
Paper: Innate Immune Responses of Drosophila melanogaster Are Altered by Spaceflight
NASA: Fruit Flies in Space
Paper: Drosophila – A Versatile Model in Biology & Medicine
Paper: The Secret Lives of Drosophila Flies
Guardian Article on Drosophila
Paper: Where are Drosphila From
Paper: Gal4 Swiss Army Knife
Nobel Prize: Drosophila
NPR: Fruit Fly Names
Nature News: Troublesome Names Get the Boot
Paper: Fly Brain Map
Fly Brain Image
UKRI: Fruit Fly Neuron Map
Paper Drosophila Sperm Storage

Meal Deal Sources Coming Soon!

78: Drosophila Melanogaster & The British Meal Deal

Why is math both so easy and so hard for our brains, and how can the psychology of horses, babies, and mathematicians help answer that? And what wild journey did Sudoku take to become the popular puzzle that Ella adores?

Things we Talk About:
The Video of a Child Learning to Count
The Melencolia Painting

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:04:59) The Psychology of Math
(01:00:35) Sudoku
(01:44:59) Outro

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: the Wonderful student, it’s not you - it’s math, “I did biology for a reason”, children can want a lot of complex things, it’s harder in the UK cause its Maths plural, Caroline & Ella’s math journeys, charlie solves the Riemann hypothesis, the horse the myth the legend - clever hans, clever hans was drafted into the military AS A MATHEMATICIAN, real horse math! so many animals seem to have Number Sense, counting is hard for kids, multiplication isn’t counting - it’s memorization and other strategies, Caroline doesn’t have a great Mental Blackboard, kick flipping a chair in our minds to brag to Caroline, overlapping waves, hot or not for equations, hahaha a taylor expansion?? in Lp?? ridiculous! there is no one math organ in the brain, don’t give up on math, “I don’t treat math as a monolith (I think statistics is the worst math)”, that surprises me because sudoko’s amazing and you’re wrong, the ancient mystical turtle’s magic square, a mathematical warding spell, “once something is proved true, it is eternally true”, HOW DID ELLA NOT REALIZE THIS WAS A MATH TOPIC, magic squares are unsolved, math divination, wow this is a math’s topic huh, maths in art, Melancholia, the magic square on La Sagrada Familia, wait Magic Squares AREN’T the precursor to sudoku?? I don’t know this child, if not sudoku why sudoku shaped? the Latin square originated in Korea before Euler, my parents are older than sudoku, it was originally called Number Place, even though we call it Sudoku - in Japan it’s often called Number Place for trademark reasons, the 2004 sudoku boom, sudoku is an infectious meme, this topic took so long (because Ella took sudoku breaks), figuring out the question of unique puzzles, so many ways to think about a square, advanced sudoku techniques, x-wing and swordfish, sudoku championships, of course Ella found speed running in this topic, Sudoku doesn’t seem to cure cognitive decline - but it’s also just fun to do! a beautiful sudoku poem, it’s how we learn and it’s calming - a little win, “I feel like I need to lie down”, let us know if you know the difference between 3 apples and 4 apples.

Sources:
Perfect Pitch Study
Feigenson et al. Core System of Number
The Clever Hans Phenomenon Revisited
NYTimes Berlin's Wonderful Horse
Actual Horse Number Sense Study
Number Sense in Animals
Rat Brain Number Sense Study
NPR Why Big Numbers Break our Brains
Erikson Institute Video of Child Counting
The Development of Mathematical Cognition
Math Expert Brain Activity Study
The Beauty of Math Study
University of MAryland on Math Brain Activity
Keith Devlin Stanford Talk
Katie Steckles: What Do Mathematicians Do All Day?
---
Wikipedia: Magic Square
Royal Institution: Magic Square
University of Cambridge: Magic Square
Magic Squares in Islamic Mathematics
Wiki: Sudoku
The Guardian: History of Sudoku
The Science of Sudoku by BY JEAN-PAUL DELAHAYE
Paper: There Is No 16-Clue Sudoku
Advanced Sudoku Techniques:
Wiki: World Sudoku Championships
Sudoku.com: The Fastest Sudoku Player
Sudoku.com: 4 Reasons that Sudoku is the Perfect Puzzle Game
Working Memory
BBC: Puzzle Slolving and Cognitive Decline
Sudoku 15 year study
Global Council on Brain Health Report
Sudoku Mental Fortitude

79: The Psychology of Math & Sudoku

IT'S THE MAX FUN DRIVE!!!

See our Game Night Livestream Monday March 27th at 5pm EST!

Get cool drive rewards and listen to our special bonus episode!

Can Large Language Models be used for good in scientific fields? Could space smell... good? And what olympic events have we tried, abandoned, and completely forgotten about?

Things we mention:
Compulsory Figures

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!
Join our Discord!

We also learn about:

Using ChatGPT to break up with your partner, it’s all very dry, you have to know the knowledge going in, LLMs are tools not databases, ChatGPT as a co-author, authorship carries accountability, Galactica was only public for 3 days, you can’t use galactica anymore happy??? racist protien AI, Protien and Chemistry Language Models are amazing, transparency with AI, the Bloom Project, ChatGPT emotionally ends the episode early, be funnier, in space no one can smell you smell, Venus smells like eggs, Tom volunteers to smell space, how smell works, don’t breathe if you’re driving, olfactory epithelium, 40 million olfactory neurons. a 40 million piece slimy jigsaw in my nose, asmr smells, 1 atom per cubic centimeter in space, Tim Peake’s answer, the smell of static, getting a refund for Tim’s answer, making ozone in space, sexy dying stars, Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon, your grill makes star smell, raspberries at the center of our universe, a number so big it makes you laugh, the IRAM telescope, one of the largest interstellar molecules, I’ll show you Tim Peake! I was looking for amino acids but now I know what the black hole cloud might smell like, combining all the smells into a cocktail, who knows what the rest of space smells like! No, I’m going to fight you Caroline, Koribos wins the entire Olympics, the rise in wells, ancient pump up music, armor racing a car with 4 minds of its own, the 5 month long Olympics, putting the figure in figure skating, dueling flash mob, the wonder of demonstration sports, goal ball, Olympic tiktoking, hurting Caroline and Ella with the art Olympics, write fanfiction for us, at least they had standards to not give medals, that’s my dad on a bike! trying can be more poetic than poetry.

Sources:

How ChatGPT works
What ChatGPT and Generative AI Mean for Science – Nature
Nature Biomedical Engineering Paper
ChatGPT: Five Prioroties for Research – Nature
Specialised LLMs – Toward Data Science
Galactica Only Survived Three Days
Med-BERT
NVIDIA Blog on Biology LLMs
Bloom: the Open LLM
---
TedEd: How Does Smell Work?
Tim Peak- What Space Smells Like
Australian Academy of Science
Increased complexity in Interstellar Chemistry 2009
NASA: Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko
Space: Comet 67P
Smithsonian: Asteroid 162173 Ryugu
Scientific America: Four Great Scents From Outer Space
---
Hippias' History of Olympics
Hugh Lee's Paper on the First Recorded Olympics
MET: Ancient Olympics
IOC: Chariot Racing
Official Record of Early Olympics Games
LA Times: Compulsory Figures
Skating Scene: Compulsory Figures
WSJ: Compulsory Figures
Ellyn Kestnbaum's Culture on Ice
Royal Armories: Dueling at the Olympics
Gliding at he Olympics
IOC: Horse Skijoring
Goalball Origins
Smithsonian Mag: Art at the Olym
O Sport Poem

36: Scientific Language Models, The Smell of Space, and Forgotten Olympic Events

Apologies all, Ella's computer kicked the bucket, so we'll be back next week with a fresh episode!

Technical Difficulties: Back Next Week!

Is there more to learn than to fear from toxic animals? How would we warn future humans about present dangers? And what are better ways for us to be buried? 

Things we mention:
WIPP Mock Up Images

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about:

This ant can kill 1 million elephants, haven’t found a venomous mushroom… yet, a lot of my friends are toxic frogs, nom nom nom I eat poison, don’t touch shit, from none to death, the schmidt sting index, I want the data not the sting, what schmidts data was actually saying, some toxins don’t correlate with pain or lethality, venomous mammals are have in common that they’re disregarded, shrews beareth a cruel mind, arguably venomous slow lorises, expanding our definition of toxicity, letting tom load a joke, protecting the future from caroline’s savage burns, the waste isolation pilot plant, 573 known extinct languages, I can haz nuclear waste? skull and crossbones, cubed morphines, “this place is a message…this place is not a place of honor”, landscape of thorns, forboding blocks, it’s giving kiki, taking a photo on a spike for the gram, nucelar priesthood, ray cats, “they didnt really care what we said i think”, understanding our past to connect to our future, just leave a dvd of the mummy, we’ve been burying people for 120,000 years, inventing oven crypts in the 1800s, gotta workshop the name oven crypt, “I want to be in a big bone pit”, lots of places resuse plots, just walking past a pile of tombstones! blasting our relatives into the stratosphere, natural burials, fungus coffins, water cremation.

Sources:
Poison, Venom, Toxungens
Atlas Obscura Schmidt Sting Index
NPR Justin Schmidt Interview
First Sting Index Paper: Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms
Evolution of Stings and Sociality
NYTimes Interview with Schmidt
Venomous Mammals: A Review
Nekaris Paper on Loris Bites Between Each Other
Loris Venom for Communication
Loris Venom for Cobra Mimicry
Shrew Spit Tames Cancer Cells
Justin Schmidt Obituary
---
The US Energy Department Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
EPA What is Transuranic Radioactive Waste?
Understanding Extinct Languages: When and Why They Die Off
Jolly Roger
Pirates, Poison, and Professors: A Look at the Skull and Crossbones Symbol
Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Summary of WIPP Team A report with images
Vice: How to Warn the Future About Toxic Waste
Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository
Nevada Attorney General: The Fight Against Yucca Mountain
The Ray Cat Solution
---
BBC: Death Rituals in the Animal Kingdom
BBC: What Happens When We Run Out of Space to Bury the Dead
BBC: The World is Running Out of Burial Space
A Thought Experiment by J. Harrington
Forbes: Rising to Heaven 
Dawn: South Africa's Graveyard Generation Mourns 
IOL: What About the Ancestors 
Paper: The environmental pollution caused by cemeteries and cremations: A review
EA: The Grave Issue of Pollution From Cemeteries 
Sending Your Ashes to Spaces
Smithsonian: What is Water Cremation
Ask A Mortician
Ask A Mortician: Water Cremation
Ask A Mortician: Green Burial Options

37: Loving Toxicity, Future Warnings, and Better Burials

Special guest Ellen Weatherford joins us to ask: just how interesting can water and fish be? And are there any pokemon inspired by strange but real animals? 

Check out Ellen's podcasts "Just the Zoo of Us" and "Spellbound and Gagged"

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about: defining fish, “just be cool about it”, defining drowning, Ellen and Caroline teach Tom and Ella about where water oxygen comes from, history of breathing, where we’re going we don’t need bones, christmas tree worm, osmoregulation and ion gradients i love it and i wish i understood it better, keeping a salt backpack, gills and lungs, “sorry for the crisis”, I’ve been sleeping on fish, mmmmm actually gonna evolve back to the water, can I get a return on these lungs? but what we’re talking about is drowning. cold water more oxygen, arapaima, ding ding ding drowning yay! thousand mile dead zones, only some sharks need to move to breathe, Ram Ventilation vs Buccal Pumping at Coachella, buccal vs buckle, asmr buccal pumping, tuna need to swim or drown, letting arapaima rest in your arms, learning to love fish, Spiders and Commitment, alligators vs manatees, singing a B flat for gators, alligator snapping turtle, bringing Ellen to party, Wooper and Clodsire, the iberian ribbed newt, obliterating your future husband with a Whimsicott.

Sources:
WHO Definition of Drowning
Origin of Gills
2022 Gill Ion Regulation Paper
Evolution of Lungs
Lung Conversion to Swim Bladders
How Fish Deal with Salinity
Salmon Osmoregulation
Bullshark Osmoregulation
Cold Water Holds more Oxygen
Hypoxia Adaptations in the Amazon Rainforest
Air Breathing Arapaima
Gill Remodeling
Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
Hypoxia Task Force
Tuna Ram Ventilation

Recast: The Funcanny Valley - Spellbound and Gagged

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