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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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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

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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

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

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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

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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"

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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

38: Ellen Weatherford, Can Fish Drown, and Real Pokemon

What are the myths and facts around the hormonal birth control pill? Why are there two highest points on Earth, and does that teach us about our planet? And what are all the ways period products affect the world we live in?

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Join our Discord!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:04) The Pill
(00:52:01) The 2 Highest Points on Earth
(01:28:28) Period Products
(01:49:10) Outro

We also learn about: Now that’s a rabbithole I can go down, taking half the pill makes you bi, LLE now played in health classes across the nation, the Ebers papyrus, they weren’t just using contraception they were communicating it, ancient Egyptian RAs, can’t get pregnant when you’re dead from mercury poisoning, the witch bull, bundling is the x games of abstinence, Tom definitely knows how the pill works, it’s not that men don’t know about women’s health it’s that women have to know about men’s health too, 1827 we discover the egg, 1843 confirmed conception happens when sperm enters the egg, the worlds fair of contraception, the American Birth Control League, Ella has a revelation, if I were a contraception and you took me I’d be an oral contraception, the original pill was 66x stronger to try to prove it was effective, bogus bad faith birth control studies, don’t well me, the Earth is squished because it spins, Team Everest vs Team Chimborazo, what the fuck is sea level, NERD I KNOW YOU’RE DOING MATH, nonbinary sex ed is just learning about mountains, 8,000 meters above Church, the air-sea interface, the metonic cycle of 19 years, carrying sea level, that’s what Tom gets for planning a joke, the geoid, a slide from Everest to Chimborazo, the death zone, our third ancient Egypt reference, Hypatia throws a pad, i got you a 100 rock that’s what you need right? the black hole of period history, you can’t abstinence periods, if you’ve used a sanitary belt join the discord! using WWII bandages, menstrual products vs the environment, the menstrual cup recommended by 3/3 members of the podcast, period poverty, the pink tax and the tampon tax, menstrual contact “turns new wine sour” “hives of bees die”, the stigma and cost of menstrual products, efforts to reduce period poverty, sniping review corner.

Sources:
Paper: The history of contraception: From ancient egyptians to the "morning after"
NYT: In Ancient Times, Flowers and Fennel For Family Planning
NHS: Sex and contraception after birth
The Bull of Innocent VIII
Mercury Policy MIT: History Of Mercury Use in Products and Processes
Book: Encyclopedia of Motherhood, Volume 1
Paper: Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old South
UN: Contraceptive Use by Method
PBS: The Timeline of the Pill
Vox: Where The Pill is Free
Planned Parenthood: History of the Pill
Paper: Return to fertility following discontinuation of oral contraceptives
Paper: “They Destroy the Reproductive System”: Exploring the Belief that Modern Contraceptive Use Causes Infertility
The Guardian: Contraceptive Pill 'Can Lead Women to Choose Wrong Partner'
Paper: MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oral contraceptives
Paper: The impact of combined oral contraceptives on ocular tissues: a review of ocular effects
Paper: Oral contraceptive use in women changes preferences for male facial masculinity and is associated with partner facial masculinity
Paper: Relationship Satisfaction and Outcome in Women Who Meet Their Partner While Using Oral Contraception
---
NOAA on the Tallest Mountain
Nat Geo on Sea Level
Britannica Definition of Sea Level
Bradshaw's History of English Levelling
NOAA on the Metonic Cycle
Vox on the GeoPolitics of Surveying
NOAA's New Datum for 2025
GIS Geography on the Geoid
ESRI on the Geoid
Everest's Death Zone
Scientific American on the Geoid
Ciro Pabon on the Practicality of Sea Level
---
Menstruation Products in the Science Museum
History of The Tampon
The Evolution of Menstrual Products
Enviromenstrual Fact Sheet
Which Period Products Are Best for the Environment?
The Tampon Tax: Everything You Need to Know
Tampon Tax Abolished
Action Aid: Period Poverty

39: The Pill, The 2 Highest Points on Earth, and Period Products

Special guests Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin from Secretly Incredibly Fascinating and Creature Feature answer: Have birds ever been to space? Why does Katie love birds so much? And how did Alex bring about the bison emoji to everyone's phones?

Things we Talk About:

The Quails in Space video we watched over and over

The Club Winged Manakin's "Call"

Katie's Snoopy Comics

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:07:13) Space Birds
(00:38:46) Birds & Bison Emoji
(00:54:59) Outro

We also learn about: 

Birds have home field advantage here, DIY animal behavior major, baby elephant soccer coach, a big podcast stew, why can’t birds just fly to space, we all share one brain cell, the Karman line, Ruppell's griffon vulture once flew into a jet engine, or rather the engine ate the bird, vultures are actually clean birds, high altitude vultures have blood adaptations, don’t dope vulture blood, USA lost the birds in space race, space farming, cloacal docking with the ISS, the quails in space video breaks us, who will teach the first generation of space quails? Chernobyl birds, stop doing unjustified wars and send chernobyl birds to space, Chix in Space, Katie wants to put a hummingbird in space, Canadian goose alien, Katie’s childhood Wile E Cayoe trap, birds relatable alien adorably arrogant dinosaurs, club winged manakin stridulation calls, Alex’s 18 page bison proposal, bird aliens return to the feet of a bison emoji statue, how Katie met Alex, Katie’s Peanuts comics, all great friendships start with an amazing bit.

Sources:
Audubon: The Amazing Story of the Cold War Space-Egg Race
Audubon's Initially Mistaken Blog on Space Birds
Smithsonian on Bird Flight Height
Smithsonian Zoo on Ruppell's Griffon Vulture
Nasa on the Edge of Space
Cornell Bird Lab on Japanese Quail

44: Katie Goldin & Alex Schmidt, Space Birds, and the Bison Emoji 🦬

What previous scientific theories would turn into the ones we know today, and what can they teach us? Why is Tuberculosis still a thing in the modern age? And who were the Radium girls, and what did they give us?

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

Join our Discord!

We also learn about:

Oh Fuck Tom and Ella and Caroline, theory vs pseudoscience, scientific glow up, the LLE game show theme, any time Tom isn’t talking he’s doing a little dance, preformationism, tiny growing dinosaur gametes, miasma, spontaneous generation, the amber effect, Darwin couldn’t sleep thinking about geology, what a nerd, the expanding earth, every theory can be explained by little expanding dinosaurs, Marie Tharp’s “Girl Talk, revisiting Vulcan, planet mnemonics, Ella snipes the answer, an actual Einstein name drop, Einstein was so excited to think he could solve the mercury problem, my topic superseded yours, what is Tuberculosis, TB is at least 9,000 years old, when TB was romanticized (by the wealthy), “how interesting he looks in dying”, TOM STOP DANCING!, people think this is a disease of old but it’s not, antibacterial resistance could be as big a threat as climate change, 1 Billion people have latent TB, the real enemy once again is capitalism, novel’s rapid test, there’s no Return on Investment with TB research, unless you patent the cure, J&J COULD SELL IT FOR A QUARTER AND STILL MAKE A PROFIT, only 40,000 people have received bedaquiline in 11 years, evergreening a patent is Sinister, amnesty period of science in the misc topic, even with nobel prizes scientists didn't realize how dangerous this stuff was, the Curies are buried in led coffins, Curie’s legacy is “literally untouchable”, Will It Radium? Radium Schokolade, it’s rejuvenating! radium quackery, radium silk, the government said it MUST have radium if you’re advertising it does, alpha radiation mostly hurts when ingested, glowing radium dust dresses, surely THIS is how they got poisoned right?? touching the brush to the lips was a cost saving measure, radiation poisoning sucks, the US radium corp claimed the women were just suffering from syphilis, hiding scientific investigations, the radium girls fight against capitalism and make labor history, radium girls lead to an international nuclear treaty, but they still sold radium tonics! Byers’ photograph helped ban radithol, the podcast make you old.

Sources:
Wikipedias list of Superseded Theories
Miasma
Spontaneous Generation
Thomas Browne's Origins of Electricity
Excerpt on Amber from Yamamoto's "The Pull Of History"
Scientific American on Darwin's Geology
Cathy Barton on Expanding Earth Theory
Marie Tharp
How Le Verrier came to Believe in Vulcan
Royal Society: The Eclipse that Verified Einstein
Nat Geo & Thomas Levenson on Vulcan and Einstein
---
TB Pathology
Tuberculosis: A Fashionable Disease?
9000 Year Old TB
The Other Pandemic
Treating TB
Diagnosing TB
Novel Chegou
Bedaquiline Approval
Bedaquiline Efficacy
Bedaquiline Cost
Bedaquiline patent
---
Science Museum Group: The Radium Girls 
Britannica: Radium 
Britannica: Marie Curie 
Nobel Prize: Marie Curie Physics awards
Nobel Prize: Marie Curie- Overview 
The Atlantic: How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer
Nature Chemistry: The Realities of Radium
CNN: When Beauty Products Were Radioactive 
Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity: Radithor 
Britannica: Radium Girls
Library of Congress Blogs: Radium Girls 
The Radium Girls Websit 
Inside Hook: Radium Girls Legacy 
NPR: Radium Girls Legacy

45: Superseded Science, why is TB Still a Thing, and the Radium Girls

Submit your questions for our end of year Q&A episode at letslearneverything.com/question or in our discord!

Submit Your Q&A Questions!

Submit Your Q&A Questions!

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