Let's Learn Everything!

It's everyone's favorite holiday: the day we ask you to submit your Q&A questions!!Go to www.LetsLearnEverything.com/questions and submit your questions about truly anything at all from the science to the serious to the silly!

Why do leaves change color? No... like really?  Like, show-me-the-scientific-literature-really? After all how mysterious could the answer be? And holy frick we're finally doing a topic on swearing!! What are the eras of swearing, and what is swearing actually good for? Listen to our episode of Escape this Podcast: Oceananigans pt. 3 - The Bering-toss StraitImages we Talk About:Carotenemia HandsTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:03:34) Autumn Leaves(00:53:04) Swearing(01:42:57) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!Congrats to Kelly & Zach on the book prize! We should write a book, chilli peppers are spicy cause mammals digest them before pooping them out, magnesium makes leaves green, it’s worth it to drop leaves because when they do work they’re so efficient, man trees are interesting, carotenemia, “yeah so if you want an unnecessary amount of detail…”, Caroline has an answer for all our questions, anthocyanins, red leaves could be aposematic, finding one explanation for a color doesn’t mean we know for sure, Tom calls the climate change turn, warmer weather keeps leaves greener in autumn (good) but there’s less sunlight to use it (bad), animals use autumn leaf colors to help with migration, wont someone think of the leaf peepers, I don’t know/we don’t know, this might be too much swearing - thats a threat and a promise, the versatility of fuck, “fuck is good”, may all your teeth fall out except one to give you a toothache, Ella read a book for this of all topics, “hmm… fuck cunt shit…”, determining a historic swear is like jazz - it’s the swear words you don’t see, stop trying to make clit a thing, Ella was totally right to put a swear warning at the top, the nuance of gender roles in ancient rome, Fuck has a beautiful equality to it, shitepokes and windfuckers, cunt used to be just a regular word for vulva, medieval ages didn’t care about shit… literally, the journey of swearing makes dull history exciting, UK US Australia swearing differences, if Ella’s dad saind cunt that’s naughty - if Tom’s dad said it they’d need to have a conversation, our swearing histories, why do we keep swearing? swearing has social benefits, swearing is intimate! swearing for emphasis and believability, we swear without thinking and yet it’s so socially complex, swearing activates different parts of the brain, the “fuck” region of our brain and the fuck region of our brain are closer than we thought, screaming neutral words as a control, swearing is why Ella is the strongest host, we still don’t know Why swearing is so powerful for us, tell us your favorite swears! review corner breaks the fourth wall.Sources:Cleaveland Clinic : Can Eating Too Many Carrots Turn Your Skin Orange?Harvard Forest: The Process of Leaf Color ChangeUSDA: Science of Fall ColorsHarvard Forest: The Biological Significance of Leaf Color Change2022 Paper: The phenomenon of red and yellow autumn leaves: Hypotheses, agreements and disagreements2004 Paper: Plant coloration undermines herbivorous insect camouflageScience Direct: Plant coloration undermines herbivorous insect camouflage2004 Paper: Nature's Swiss Army Knife: The Diverse Protective Roles of Anthocyanins in Leaves2012: Simulated herbivory advances autumn phenology in Acer rubrum2002 Paper: Foliage color contrasts and adaptive fruit color variation in a bird-dispersed plant communityCID: How Climate Change Impacts Leaf PigmentsImage: Heam VS Chlorophyll---Yiddish CurseSwearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English - Geoffrey HughesHoly Shit by Mellisa MohrStapleton et al “The power of swearing: What we know and what we don’t”Study: Swearing as a HypoalgesicStudy: Swearing Makes you Stronger

Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm joins us to casually answer all of our pressing linguistics questions with the most mind blowing facts.  Why does science use so much dang latin, and what is so unique about internet linguistics?Images we Talk About:Gretchen's Favorite FrogsTimestamps:(00:00:00) Intro(00:10:58) Latin in Science(00:54:49) Misc & Internet Linguistics(01:22:46) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!We also learn about: Words that change the state of the universe, a promise is a kind of magic, “people ask me how i make a living doing linguistics and it’s very simple actually” just make podcast wagers, the language of space, space pidgin language, “that’s a great hypothesis and it’s actually hte opposite of that” sometimes the answer is imperialism! English is being used in science now how Latin was back then, the vulgate bible was latin to reach more people even the “vulgar”, you’re cousins a scribe learning latin - what are you doing a podcast? “Writing is a Technology”, writings only been invented like 4 times, writing originated as reciepts and lists, the A is an upside down ox, why invent a new letter when that means having to change the printing press - just double letter! you access computing through programming and programming is linked to language, we don’t know whether the first language was spoken or signed, french linguists once banned the discussion of the origin of language bcause it was deemed “fruitless”, it’s wild we could retrofit our brains to read and write at all, changing, linguistically accurate sesame street, “Who would know aught of art must learn, act, and then take his ease”,  Ella you have goregous tripthongs, nice try Gretchen but our 69th episode was a few back, the Mini frogs, isn’t a linguistic podcast niche? you’re saying that to me in a language, Gretchen loses her words and makes perfect sense, Gretchen went back in time to give herself this mystery book, you don’t have to be the version of yourself you imagined when you were twelve, Linguistics loves undergrad researchers to explain the youths, there’s always new linguistics to study, the kids are changing language- and that’s so fascinating, linguists and polyglots are related but not the same, what makes internet language Uniquely internety, is it really internet lingo or just AAE, the internet made people write a lot more than they used to, informal and unmediated writing is uniquely internet linguistics, people have wanted a sarcasm punctuation since at least 1575, emoji are a form of gesture, postcards were sometimes numbered like twitter threads, Gretchen did Sooo much research into the literature of sarcasm, the potential for misunderstanding is the point of sarcasm, “sarcasm is this linguistic trustfall”, pushing the boundaries of what a language can be, Solresol the musical conlang, language is everything - rainbows are language, whitespace programming language, 

Cryptids may be spooky, but what about the spooky animals that turned out to be... real?? And what makes a good spooky story? Could it be something secretly... heartwarming??Timestamps:(00:07:15) Intro(00:04:21) Former Cryptids(00:54:25) The Art of Spooky Stories(01:52:33) OutroSupport us with a Max Fun Membership!Join our Discord!We also learn about: Caroline have you never met a vampire? that was from episode number Four Three, what’s spookier than having to be known, Ella met Tom the true Cryptid, the cryptid museum was research, formerly the cryptic mascot: the Okapi, komodo dragons inspired king kong, 60 iron tipped teeth (like beavers), dragon virgin birth, yes queen life finds a way, squid squads on the hunt, only photographed in 2004, 20 years ago - don’t say that, 8 fully controllable giant tentacles, “I’m learning!” as it drags you down to the bottom of the ocean, save the whales because we need them on our team for the kraken wars, you know what’s not a cryptid? western hegemony, the head of a fox and the tail of a monkey, so many names for the jackalope across the world, are jackalopes cancer??? the Jackalope and HPV vaccine are zero degress of separation away, Ella writes a sappy ending for Tom, Ella watched The Ring at 6, being retold Evangelion in an art class, a meteor made of vampires, King’s 3 kind of scary, “don’t you like to feel the shivers?”, evangelical horror, Zhiguai - accounts of the strange, a story of a beautiful harp player, creepypastas, Ella formaly apologize for her cocktober misstep, “I see you sluts out there and I don’t want to do you any disservice, two sentence horror, the artistry of Telling a scary story, maybe the real spooky story was the friends we made along the way who were dead the whole time.SourcesGuardian: Komodo DragonsESA Journals: The Okapi of the ApadanaBBC: Facts About Komodo DragonsScientific American: Iron Tipped TeethNew Yorker: The Squid HunterBBC Science Focus: Giant SquidWiki: Giant SquidOn the Track of Unknown AnimalsThe Strange Adventures of Andrew BattellPBS: Fantastic CreaturesEvolutionary Anthropology: Discovering GorillaCambridge University Press: Hanno and GorillaeNature: The First Description of a KangarooNational Geographic: The Myth of the Komodo Dragon’s Dirty MouthShope OG paperRoyal Society Paper: Shope Papilloma VirusThe Scientist: On the Trail of the Jackalope---NYTimes Story on Exxon and Climate ChangeA History of HorrorTimothy Beal Paper on Evangelical HorrorPliny The Elder's Ghost StoryLiu Ming Ming on ZhiguaiThe Story of LiangGan Bao In Search of the SupernaturalRetelling Urban Legends StudySCP Antimemetics DivisionJSTOR Daily on Alvin Schwartz's ProcessCRR Library on Alvin Schwartz Language Arts Interview