Collections — Universities, colleges & schools
Dreaming Spires & Odd Academies
Where the facts are manufactured. Oxbridge, the Ivy League and the research labs the show loves to quote — the institutions that exist to know things, which is rather the point.
28 places in this collection
- 1Cambridge UniversityUnited Kingdom
Cambridge University asked Prince Philip to defend his honour by playing them at Tiddlywinks, and Prince Philip wrote back saying, very politely, "I'd absolutely love to, bit busy, but perhaps I could nominate…
Open this place → - 2Oxford UniversityUnited Kingdom
On the Bayeux Tapestry, you can tell how important someone is by the size of their horse's penis.
Open this place → - 3HarvardUnited States
There was a study in 1973 at Harvard and they got some cheetahs and they flew them over to Harvard and they made them run on treadmills with thermometers stuck up their bums.
Open this place → - 4University of CaliforniaUnited States
Helen Gilkey was the first woman to receive a PhD in botany at the University of California in Berkeley.
Open this place → - 5University of EdinburghUnited Kingdom
In 2017, some scientists at the University of Edinburgh found a huge amount of helium in the middle of Scotland.
Open this place → - 6Duke UniversityUnited States
The family minister wrote to a parapsychology lab at Duke University when the boy was 14 years old, so 1949, and said that his bed shook when he was in it.
Open this place → - 7Cornell UniversityUnited States
Researchers at Cornell University in New York looked at his papers, and they knew which ones were fake and which ones the data was fake and which it was real.
Open this place → - 8University of GlasgowUnited Kingdom
There were more than 20,000 miniature soldiers at the University of Glasgow and they replayed the Battle of Waterloo on a 192-square-metre historical map.
Open this place → - 9Imperial CollegeUnited Kingdom
At Imperial College in London, they've started deliberately making mosquitoes with fluorescent testicles.
Open this place → - 10PrincetonUnited States
In 1927, Princeton's internal newspaper, the Daily Princeton, revealed that the university was going to begin admitting women.
Open this place → - 11Columbia UniversityUnited States
There was a psychologist from Columbia University who said that crossword puzzles satisfied the 45 fundamental desires of the human species.
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- 13Stanford UniversityUnited States
One of the leading theories is that in 1971 and 1972, a first transaction was made between students at Stanford University and MIT, and they were selling weed to each other.
Open this place → - 14Wheaton CollegeUnited States
It was auctioned off and taken to a place called Wheaton College.
Open this place → - 15University of ManchesterUnited Kingdom
There was a study by the University of Manchester which took pillows which had been used for various lengths of time, and they found several thousand spores of fungus per gram of pillow.
Open this place → - 16University of LeicesterUnited Kingdom
Joe Appleby at the University of Leicester looked at the bones and saw that Richard the Third got fucked up when he got killed.
Open this place → - 17University of British ColumbiaCanada
The University of British Columbia has an official A-Lab, which is their syntax of speech lab — it's where you go if you want to study the linguistics of that kind of thing, and it's called the A-Lab.
Open this place → - 18Princeton UniversityUnited States
Some guys at Princeton University, Paul Elson and Morgan Tingley, decided that they wanted to do a survey and see how many mountains do in fact have pointy peaks.
Open this place → - 19University of ChicagoUnited States
Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a prototype app designed for cannabis users so they can determine whether or not they are actually high.
Open this place → - 20University of TokyoJapan
In 2008, researchers at the University of Tokyo teamed up with Japan's origami airplane association.
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- 22Washington State UniversityUnited States
Because you can patent an apple, every time someone buys one of these, a bit of the money goes to Washington State University, because they were the people who cross-bred it.
Open this place → - 23University College LondonUnited Kingdom
There was one person at University College London who left the job — I think they retired.
Open this place → - 24University of TexasUnited States
It was a new study by a guy called Josh Malone, who was at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas in Austin.
Open this place → - 25University of BirminghamUnited Kingdom
There was a meta-analysis of 785 academic studies done by the University of Birmingham and they found that laughter can cause fainting, asthma, headaches, incontinence, dislocated jaw, infectious diseases.
Open this place → - 26Exeter UniversityUnited Kingdom
The professor of geology at Exeter University is called Dr.
Open this place → - 27Brown UniversityUnited States
It was just created at Brown University to piss off their fellow students.
Open this place → - 28Lancaster UniversityUnited Kingdom
This all comes from a thing called the Spoken British National Corpus of 2014, and that's done by Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University.
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