76: The HaLearn Days 2024

Episode notes

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

Support us with a Max Fun Membership!

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