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The BrainFood Show

The BrainFood Show

By: Cloud10
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 In this show, the team behind the wildly popular TodayIFoundOut YouTube channel do deep dives into a variety of fascinating topics to help you feed your brain with interesting knowledge.Cloud10 World
Episodes
  • The Incredible Black Arrow Rocket

    The Incredible Black Arrow Rocket
    Feb 19 2026
    When it comes to technological achievement and national prestige, few feats can compare to launching a satellite into space. Since the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik I, on October 4, 1957, 11 other government bodies have developed indigenous orbital launch capability: the United States, France, Japan, China, India, Israel, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, South Korea, and a group of 22 nations represented by the European Space Agency. Conspicuously absent from the list is the United Kingdom, which in the late 1960s succeeded in developing this capability only to immediately abandon it. This is the story of the tragically brief British space program. At the end of the Second World War, Britain was well-positioned to start its own advanced rocketry program. Like the United States and the Soviet Union, the victorious ally had captured dozens of the German V2 rockets which had rained down on Southern England and Belgium at the end of the war - along with many of the scientists and technicians who had built and fired them. In October 1945, the British Army launched Operation Backfire, in which three captured V2s were assembled, launched, and filmed near Cuxhaven in Northern Germany. These experiments gave the British a wealth of knowledge and experience on the workings of the German terror weapon. One year later, on December 23, 1946, R.A. Smith and H.E. Ross of the British Interplanetary Society submitted to the Ministry of Supply a design for a modified V2 that could carry a man into space. Their concept replaced the rocket’s one-ton explosive warhead with a pressurized capsule that would detach at apogee and parachute to earth. Alas Britain, shattered both physically and financially by the war, could not afford to fund such a project, and all plans for military and civilian rocketry were quietly shelved... Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link ⁠https://incogni.com/brainfood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    18 mins
  • The Junior High Dropout That Created Dunkin' Donuts

    The Junior High Dropout That Created Dunkin' Donuts
    Feb 18 2026
    In 1847 at the tender age of 16, seaman Hanson Gregory looked at some frying dough and said, “Everything is better with holes”… except his ship hull probably… and created the staple of breakfasts the diabetes lovin’ world over- the doughnut! Or so the story goes anyway. In truth, Captain Gregory’s account of how and why he supposedly invented the doughnut varied over time, and despite a statue being made of him in Rockport, Maine in 1947 commemorating his fried genius, nobody really knows where the holed doughnut came from. Some, including Captain Gregory, claim putting the hole in it makes it so you don’t get a mouthful of grease when you eat the center, but plenty of doughnuts exist that have no holes with no such issue. And people have been frying up such cakes for millennia with no apparent inclination to take the center out, except for occasionally to replace it with things like fruit and other fillings. Nevertheless, it was in the late 19th and early 20th century that suddenly many decided a hole should be present in such fried dough. As to why, the timing of the change gives arguably the best hypothesis, or at least potentially why it became popular. Around the same time doughnuts with holes first popped up in New York City, bagels were also becoming very popular in the same place and were commonly put on display and sold stacked on wooden dowels. Thus, it is sometimes hypothesized that bakers in New York first got the bright idea to put holes in the dough before frying when one or more of them thought to sell the doughnuts in the same way as bagels- on dowels, which saved display space and, perhaps more significantly, made it easier to sell en masse on street corners. With this hypothesis, making more evenly fried dough may or may not have come into play. Whatever the case, this holey fried dough rapidly gained in popularity in the early 20th century, particularly receiving a huge boost thanks to WWI and soldiers’ love of them in the trenches. This all leads us to the topic of today- that time a Jr High dropout might as well have put a hole in people’s pockets with how fast they started throwing money at him when he created one of the most successful franchise businesses in history- The Open Kettle… Author: Daven Hiskey Host: Simon Whistler Producer: Samuel Avila Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    14 mins
  • Inventing Color in a World That was Black and White

    Inventing Color in a World That was Black and White
    Feb 17 2026
    When we think of the past prior to the 1960s or so, we tend to picture it in black and white. Much of the visual media of this period - including still photographs to films to television - was rendered in shades of grey, making relatively recent history seem that much more distant and alien. But colour photography did exist in the first half of the 20th Century; just think of classic films like The Wizard of Oz, released in 1939. But if this technology existed, why wasn’t it more common? And who first figured out how to capture the world in full living colour? Well, prepare to go from sepia to technicolour like Dorothy as we dive into the fascinating - and surprisingly long - history of colour photography. Throughout the black-and-white photography era, people added colour to photographs and film by hand-tinting them with paint and ink. However, the development of true colour photography required a scientific understanding of how humans perceive colour. In 1850, German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz developed the trichromatic theory of vision, which postulated that the human eye contained three different kinds of light receptors - today known as cone cells - each sensitive to one of three colours: red, blue, and green. In 1861, English photographer Thomas Sutton, working with Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, applied Helmholtz’s theories to create history’s first colour photograph. Sutton took three separate photographs of a tartan ribbon through a red, blue, and green filter, then converted these photographs into slides and projected them back through their respective filters, the three slides combining to create a full colour photograph. Though this image could not be fixed on a physical medium, Maxwell’s demonstration nonetheless pioneered the additive colour process, which would form the basis of colour photography for the next few decades. Shortly after Sutton’s experiment, French physicist... Author: Gilles Messier Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Caden Nielsen Host: Simon Whistler Sponsor: Incogni - Use code BRAINFOOD and get 60% off an annual plan using the link https://incogni.com/brainfood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    18 mins
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