The whole of science is stuffed full of delicious stories, and we really want to tell you every damn one of them. But we know our little human brains can’t absorb too much at one time. So today we’re introducing our new line of Wholesome SnacksTM, where we bring you a selection of new and tasty tales that have been consumed, concentrated and reconstituted just for you. Get your bib out because, in today’s snack pack, we’ve got some real doozies for you.

The weekend is a sacred thing. We live for it, we get our rest from it, but the two-day weekend as we know it has only been around for about a hundred years. The history of the work cycle across the globe is actually quite varied and at times, it gets pretty wacky.

Let’s go back to the 1960s. A time of Richard Nixon, moon obsession, hippies, the Vietnam war and… no ethics committees. Introducing Robert Allan Humphreys, a man of many disguises, a never-ending pursuit of knowledge and very questionable researching methods.

New York inventor life in the mechanical age was riveting! But there was one problem. The traffic… was horrendous. The hustle and bustle of Manhattan had become unbearable. So Alfred Beach was determined to find a solution. Eureka... A New York Pneumatic Subway!

How far would you go to get to the truth, or perhaps more pertinently, to the bottom of things? William Beaumont was one dedicated scientist. Some might say ethically… ambiguous, but hey, he was born in 1785, so, old school. Later becoming known as the Father of Gastric Physiology, Beaumont did whatever he had to do in order to understand the juicy details of the digestive system. But did he go too far?

Charles Vance Millar was the greatest troll ever. Born in Aylmer, Ontario in 1854, Charles was a fan of practical jokes. Some might have described him as a cantankerous man, capricious and out to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. Following his death, Millar’s money was to go to the mother who gave birth to the greatest number of children in the ten years after his death. And so the race began.

Are you asked to sit in on arduous meetings with no real consequence when you’ve got deadlines coming out of your ears? Maybe that’s just office politics. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a deliberate ploy against you, decades-long in the making with deep roots in espionage and sabotage.

What happens when you try to domesticate a fox? And, perhaps the most important question science has posed - can you manufacture cuteness?

We all know that sugar is bad for our teeth. But... how did we come to know that? It’s fairly common to see a healthy set of pearly whites now, but scroll back just a few decades, this wasn’t the case.

Easter Island is about as tiny and remote as you can get on the surface of our planet. It’s just 23 kilometres long (on its longest side), and as close as you can get to the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. So you’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it.

Ok... to people who don't do it, it's weird and gross and wrong. But to people who do do it, it's basically the golden fountain of youth.

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.

Humans really love a hobby and it seems the more obscure the hobby, the more obsessed we become. But if you’re looking for the gold medal in obscure and obsessive, you need look no further than Victorian salmon fly-tying.

Battleships are very large, belch smoke and move pretty slowly. If you were tasked with hiding one out on the open water, how would you go about doing it?

Today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - in the name of… science?).

Sexual performance, in particular impotence, is something that’s plagued chaps since they first crawled out of the swamp, rose up onto our hind legs, looked down, and bellowed WHY WON’T YOU WORK YOU BASTARD!

If you have listened to the previous episode “What The Hell Happened To The Left-Handers?”, you’ll know that National Geographic sent out a survey using scratch and sniff cards back in 1986. The scents they included were: banana, musk, cloves, rose, androstenone (a chemical found in sweat) and… mercaptans.

If you’re left-handed you're part of a group that makes up about 10% of the population. And this rate of left-handedness has been consistent. Historical and archaeological records, reaching as far back as the Neanderthals, tell us that we’ve had this background rate of left-handedness for quite literally all of human history.

This story begins with a strange observation. After the Civil War in America, soldiers of all ranks, abilities and backgrounds often spoke of drenching drain after battles. This apparent connection rose to the level of received wisdom. In essence — many believed the powerful explosions of battle brought rain.

The way the story goes, the Summer of 69 was when all hell broke loose in Cleveland.

It was the summer the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. Choked with industrial effluent and chemicals it burst into flames. It is said that this is the event that birthed the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Authority. America was galvanised by this shocking event. Things started to change