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PODCAST

pplpod

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends.Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

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All Episodes

26:43

Polygraph on Trial: Wonder Woman's Creator, Aldrich...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The polygraph is a 2 billion dollar American industry running about 2.5 million tests a year, yet it detects no lie. Its rubber tubes, blood pressure cuff and finger plates record breathing, cardiovascular activity and skin conductance, the signs of fight or flight arousal. Examiners prime subjects with a rigged stim test card trick, then compare reactions to irrelevant, control and relevant questions, while Japan uses the concealed information test, which looks for involuntary recognition of

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25:03

Jerusalem Syndrome: Margery Kempe's Weeping, Bar-El's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Jerusalem syndrome is an umbrella term for religiously themed delusions and psychotic episodes triggered by a visit to the city, and it crosses Christian, Jewish and Muslim lines and sometimes affects secular visitors. The pattern long predates jet lag. The 15th century itinerary of Dominican monk Felix Fabri describes pilgrims wandering the hills reenacting biblical suffering, and English mystic Margery Kempe, around 1413, wept so loudly at the holy sites that she alienated her fellow travelers

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22:39

Ivan Pavlov Without the Bell: Pavlov Pouches,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In early 1936, an 86 year old Ivan Pavlov lay dying of double pneumonia and asked a student to sit by the bed and record his final physiological sensations. This episode traces how the eldest of 10 children of a village Russian Orthodox priest in Ryazan ended up there. A severe fall from a wall at age seven kept him out of school until 11, and he later left a theological seminary after reading Dmitri Pisarev and Ivan Sechenov, who argued that all brain functions were reflexes. In St. Petersburg he

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24:11

Hiccups Explained: Tadpole Gill Reflexes, Christopher...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Hiccups have a folk reputation as a sign that someone is talking about you, a belief found in Slavic, Turkish and Luo traditions, but the medical reality is mechanical. The reflex, called singultus from the Latin for a sob, is a two part event: a sudden involuntary spasm of the diaphragm pulls air in, and about 35 milliseconds later the glottis snaps shut, and that collision makes the hic sound. Everyday triggers include eating fast, spicy food, carbonated drinks and swallowing air, but the same

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19:40

Goosebumps: Erector Pili Muscles, Cold Turkey and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Horripilation, the pilomotor reflex better known as goosebumps, begins when the sympathetic nervous system releases norepinephrine onto tiny erector pili muscles that anchor the skin's basement membrane to hair follicles. Recent anatomy shows one muscle often controls a cluster of follicles, and its contraction squeezes sebaceous glands to push oil to the surface. The follicle's deep bulb gives the muscle a firm anchor to pull against. In furred mammals the reflex traps insulating air and makes

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27:40

Blood Types Beyond ABO: Duffy-Negative Malaria...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

A bone marrow transplant can change a patient's blood type, because the donor's stem cells take over red cell production. This episode explains why that is possible: a blood type is the set of antigens on red blood cells, policed by antibodies in the plasma, and the International Society of Blood Transfusion recognizes 49 blood group systems, including Kell, Duffy, Kidd, and Lewis. Many of those variants trace to disease. One malaria parasite uses the Duffy antigen to enter red cells, so Duffy

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22:29

Wiedersheim's 86 'Useless' Organs: Embryo Tails, Baby...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Charles Darwin's 1871 book The Descent of Man described rudimentary structures like body hair, wisdom teeth, and the tailbone. In 1893 anatomist Robert Wiedersheim went much further and listed 86 human organs as wholly or partly functionless, including the pineal gland, thymus, and pituitary, whose roles were not yet understood. That outlook fed the focal infection theory, and a 1916 journal reported removing an appendix to cure facial nerve pain. This episode tours the body's genuine leftovers and

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17:58

Blushing: Darwin's Most Human Expression and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Charles Darwin corresponded with missionaries and doctors worldwide to learn whether all peoples blush, and called it the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. This episode separates blushing, which needs an emotional trigger, from flushing caused by heat, exercise, fever, or alcohol. Blushing occurs in the blush region of the cheeks, forehead, ears, neck, and upper chest, where research by Wilkin found denser, wider, shallower capillaries. A 1982 study by Mellander and colleagues showed

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26:34

Telomeres and Aging: The Hayflick Limit, Telomerase's...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Every time a human cell divides, the DNA copying machinery cannot finish the very tip of each chromosome, an issue called the end replication problem. DNA polymerase reads in only one direction and needs an RNA primer to start, so 50 to 100 base pairs are lost per division. Telomeres, thousands of repeats of the sequence TTAGGG, absorb that loss. In the 1970s Soviet biologist Alexey Olovnikov proposed that this shortening sets a ceiling on cell life, explaining Leonard Hayflick's finding that

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24:24

Lazarus Phenomenon: Velma Thomas's 17 Hours and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The Lazarus phenomenon is the spontaneous return of a heartbeat after CPR has been stopped and death declared. Anesthesiologist Jack Bray named it in 1993, though medical journals had reported it since 1982, and it appears in the literature at least 38 times. The leading explanation is mechanical: chest compressions build intrathoracic pressure that keeps blood from returning to the heart, and when compressions stop the chest relaxes and blood rushes in, stretching the heart wall and possibly firing

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23:34

Stendhal Syndrome: Fainting at Santa Croce and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1817 the French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, known as Stendhal, entered the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence among the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli and was overcome. He described a pounding heart, a sense that his life was draining away, and a fear of collapsing in the street. For more than a century doctors read his account as Romantic exaggeration. In 1989 psychiatrist Graziella Magherini at Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital documented more than 100 tourists with the same

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21:41

Fingerprints on Trial: Francisca Rojas's Thumb, Koala...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Koala fingerprints are so close to human ones that scientists struggle to tell them apart even under an electron microscope, and that oddity opens this look at how reliable fingerprints really are. Friction ridges form around the 13th to 15th week of fetal development when the skin's basal layer grows faster than the layers around it and buckles, guided by WNT, BMP, and EDAR signaling in a Turing style pattern. Conditions in the womb make even identical twins' prints differ. Fingerprints signed

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22:03

Gout: Sue the T. Rex, the Lost Uricase Enzyme and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The fossil of Sue, the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, shows signs of gout, the same disease once called the disease of kings. This episode explains the mechanism: uric acid builds up in the blood and, in cooler joints like the big toe at night, precipitates into needle shaped monosodium urate crystals. When crystals escape their protein coating, immune cells trigger the NLRP3 inflammasome, caspase-1, and interleukin-1 beta, producing the swelling and pain. Most mammals break uric acid down with the

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23:13

Doctors Without Borders: Biafra, Témoignage and the...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

When Médecins Sans Frontières accepted the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize, its representative told the room that silence can kill. The organization was born from that conviction. During the 1967 to 1970 blockade of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War, young French doctors working with the Red Cross watched civilians being deliberately starved and came to see the Red Cross policy of silent neutrality as complicity. Back in Paris they joined volunteers who had responded to a cyclone in East Pakistan, and on

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23:58

Bloodletting: George Washington's Last Night,...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1799 George Washington woke with a severe throat infection, and over the next 10 hours his doctors drained more than 124 ounces of his blood. He died shortly after. This episode explains how deliberate bleeding stayed the standard of care for over 2,000 years. The Ebers Papyrus records scarification in Egypt, possibly inspired by hippos whose red skin secretion looked like self bleeding. Hippocrates linked purging to menstruation, and Galen, who believed blood did not circulate and could pool as

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21:24

Death Masks: Tutankhamun's Gold, Roman Wax Ancestors...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

The face on the standard CPR training mannequin comes from a plaster cast of an unidentified girl, believed to be about 16, who drowned in the Seine in the 1880s. This episode traces the long history behind that cast. Egyptian burial masks like Tutankhamun's were stylized spiritual armor rather than casts of the face. In 1876 Heinrich Schliemann found gold masks over skulls at Mycenae and claimed them for Homeric heroes, though dating showed they were centuries older. Etruscans fixed bronze faces to

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24:56

Capgras Delusion: The 1923 Paris Case, Face Blindness...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

In 1923, French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras and his colleague Jean Reboul-Lachaux described a 53-year-old woman convinced that her husband, her children, and even local shopkeepers had been murdered and replaced by identical doubles. She sought a divorce from the man who looked exactly like her husband. They called it the illusion of doubles, and for decades psychiatry treated the condition through psychoanalysis as a female disorder born of repressed desires. In the 1980s doctors began finding

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23:40

Foreign Accent Syndrome: Astrid L.'s 1941 Shrapnel...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Foreign accent syndrome makes a person sound as if they suddenly speak their native language with a foreign accent, but patients never gain a new accent or a new language. The episode explains it as a breakdown in articulatory planning: vowels shift, diphthongs flatten into single sounds, and English speakers drift from stress timed rhythm toward the syllable timed rhythm of French or Spanish. Professor Nick Miller describes the accent as being in the ear of the listener, not the mouth of the

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25:59

Acupuncture as Placebo: Demon Stones, Mao's TCM and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Acupuncture was a market worth over $24 billion in 2017, yet the scientific consensus described in this episode treats it as theatrical placebo. A modern session uses five to 20 stainless steel needles between 0.16 and 0.46 millimeters wide, manipulated until the patient feels de qi and the practitioner feels needle grasp. To test it, researchers built sham needles that retract into their handles like stage daggers and also placed real needles at random points. The sham versions generally worked as

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25:40

ASMR's Brain Tingles: A 2007 Forum Post, Bob Ross and...

pplpod ·

2026/10/03

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, the static-like tingle that starts at the crown of the scalp and travels down the neck, had no name until the internet gave its sufferers a place to compare notes. On October 19, 2007, a 21-year-old user posted on a health forum called SteadyHealth about a sensation triggered by things like puppet shows or being read a story, and replies poured in from people who knew the feeling. Early users called it a brain orgasm, a label many rejected, so in 2010 forum

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