Brain Junk

Brain Junk is a two-voice trivia conversation in which Amy Barton and Trace Kerr chase facts that sound made up and then turn out to be true. The setup is simple. One of them arrives with a researched topic, and the other often meets it for the first time, so much of the show's energy comes from watching the information land. 'A freshwater crab? Crabs come in freshwater?' is a fair sample of the reaction. Animals supply a lot of the material. The ant discussion describes one ant working its way up a companion's injured leg to the hip-like joint and biting it off, gives a figure for how often infected upper-leg injuries ended in amputation, and promises the video in the show notes. The helium conversation starts with the balloon trick, along with a warning that it is not harmless, and ends up at an alligator given heliox, a helium and oxygen blend, then played recordings to provoke her bellow. The bellow did change, they report, but it came out croaky rather than squeaky. Rome's freshwater crabs appear as an urban success story, having grown to about double the size of their peers. History gets the same curiosity. As the pair lay it out, the Ball jar business spent about 110 years in glass, stopped making jars in 1996, and later built the Kepler spacecraft through its aerospace arm. A story about an MIT student said to have conditioned pigeons at Harvard's football stadium with a striped shirt, a whistle and breadcrumbs leads into bird vision, corvids that recognize human faces, and a November 1948 Associated Press account of an attempted prank on the Harvard-Yale game with wires planted underground. The tangents are part of the texture. A ladybug that flew off from beside an ear, a Gladiator scene with maggots on a wound, and a dare to send in video if anyone manages to train pigeons at a soccer field all get airtime. None of it is overpolished. One outro trips over the wrong window, and one cold open admits the talk has already gone off track. Even the farewell keeps going, with a friendly argument over whether narrowing a breeding pool counts as genetic modification and a question about why 60 degrees feels different in fall than in spring. For a first listen, '327: MIT Hacks' shows the range well, moving from bird behavior into decades-old campus pranks. In '328: The Last Gasp', the pair describe it as their last episode, at least for now, after roughly six years and with new projects underway. That leaves a large back catalog, which their final sign-off points toward.