Ridiculous History

Imagine you're an ancient traveler, visiting Rhodes for the first time in 280 BCE. As you approach the famed city, a singular object dominates the horizon: a huge statue of the Greek sun god Helios, p...

Do you have a number you love, or a number you hate? As Ben, Noel and Max discover in today's episode, people have always assigned symbolic meaning to the everpresent existence of math -- and created ...

In today's Classic episode, Ben and Noel reluctantly sing the praises of poop research. You see, folks, before Lewis and Clark set out to explore the western side of the continent, they tried to prepa...

Let's say you're a love-struck NASA intern -- your professional career holds a lot of promise, but your family life back home is in shambles... and you fall in love with a fellow intern. How can you i...

Is it legal to own a moon rock? Well... that depends. If it's a piece of the moon that made it to Earth naturally, then all good. If, however, it's a sample retrieved on purpose by NASA's Apollo progr...

On March 3rd, 1876, residents of Bath County, Kentucky were startled to see what appeared to be chunks and flakes of meat falling from the clear, cloudless sky. The rain, which only lasted a few minut...

This episode is brought to you by our favorite cohost: coffee. These days, if you stroll into any convenience store across the planet, you're going to run into a selection of energy drinks -- whether ...

While the legendary Japanese raccoon dog -- or tanuki -- may look like a raccoon, it's a very different beast. However, these days Japan is home to actual raccoons: they're considered an invasive spec...

With 600,000 words and 3 million quotations, the Oxford English Dictionary is a massive tome. Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but the first edition wasn't published until 1884. Compiling the dic...

Did you know England's first newspaper was fake? Or that King Arthur is more or less completely made up? The deeper we look into human history, the more we see that civilization is utterly riddled wit...