Australia is a wondrous country with endless sights to see. The Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Opera House, Bondi Beach, the vast sunburnt deserts... and a tiny town in Western Australia where, if you breathe, your chances of dying a horrible death will be vastly increased.

Wittenoom, considered Australia's version of Chernobyl, is a site that no one should visit (and yet some still do). Back in the 1930s, before Wittenoom was even a town, a young man named Lang Hancock kicked off a mining boom after discovering a beautiful blue rock: premium-grade blue asbestos. At first, the asbestos mining was more like fossicking on the surface, but things really kicked off when CSR (a famous Australian sugar refining company!) bought the mine and decided to take things underground.

We’ve all heard about the horrors of asbestos. But what about the miraculous side of it? Think about it - it’s a rock that you can make clothes out of, and banknotes for that matter. It’s wild. A weaveable, fire-resistant, rot-resistant rock. There’s literally nothing else like it on the planet.

With all our advances in science and modern manufacturing techniques, we still haven’t been able to come up with something to match it. Now we all know the boring modern uses of asbestos such as building materials, roofing, fireplaces etc. Boring. We want to know the more creative uses for this magical rock. Well, how does asbestos toothpaste sound to you?

Imagine a slower pace of life: Growing your own vegetables, spending more time with the children, the smell of freshly baked sourdough wafting through your well-kept home, no pesky job or financials to worry about. That does sound lovely, doesn’t it? And then while your healthy kids are playing in their mud kitchen, you hop online to chat with your tradwife friends about how to ban immigration, ban abortion, and breed out the blacks. Wait, what?!

To be fair, it’s quite a leap to go from baking bread to white supremacy. But there seems to be a connection between these wholesome and traditional values and something far more sinister. And because we can’t quite understand what the hell sourdough has to do with terrorism, we’ve invited special guest Dr Kristy Campion on the show to discuss the links between the tradwife movement and the alt-right.

In a time when women were treated atrociously, Nellie Bly (born Elizabeth Cochran) fought back. Unhappy with her journalist assignment to the lifestyle section, she embarked on a mission that would change the course of journalism forever.

Her first mission: expose the appalling treatment of patients in the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum. A casual stroll around the exterior and interview with a staffer would simply not do for Nellie’s standards. She opted for undercover, which meant feigning insanity to get herself committed… and hopefully returning home. With careful consideration, and a promise from her editor to get her out, Nellie accepted the mission and took to practising her crazy eyes in the mirror, spooking herself out with ghost stories and brushing up on her acting skills.

Ebenezer “Eben” McBurney Byers was the personification of the Roaring Twenties: Chairman of his own company, private box at the baseball, golf pro, ladies' man - total Great Gatsby vibes.

Unfortunately, Eben had a fall one day leaving him with an injury that interfered with his athletic prowess. Conventional treatment failed and so his physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Moyar, suggested he try RadiThor, an energy drink advertised as “Pure Sunshine in a Bottle” and accompanied, as quackery always is, by the usual panacea claim. But what was in this miracle drink? Well, not a lot. Just some triple distilled water and at least 1 microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228.

The notion of a humanoid machine was developed way back in the early 20th century and we’ve come a long way since then, integrating robots into every crevice of our lives. And we mean, every crevice.

We’ve got robot vacuum cleaners, retail robots, manufacturing and military robots. But what about the sexy robots? The masturbots? The love machines? Well, we were asked a stimulating question about this particular breed of bots: Is sex with a robot cheating? As it turns out, there is peer-reviewed research on the topic and where ethics, research and sexy robots meet, you’ll always find The Wholesome Show.

Picture this: you're on a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by a vast expanse of water when suddenly, you feel a sharp pain. No, it's not a metaphorical pang of regret for opting for the slow boat rather than the quick and painless intercontinental flight; it's an actual mouse bite. Welcome to the wild world of Gianluca Grimalda, a climate scientist with a penchant for slow travel and an unwavering commitment to the environment… machete-wielding gangsters, mice bites, job loss and all.

The 1980s had some memorable fads and crazes—hair metal bands, neon leotards, the Walkman… and criminal profiling!

One big name, and even bigger ego, in the criminal profiling world, was Richard Walter. Walter had an impressive resume, claiming to have reviewed thousands of murder cases, written criminology papers, lectured at universities, and served as an expert witness on hundreds of trials. Having worked as a staff psychologist at a prison in his earlier years, Walter had a profound understanding of the criminal mind. And he loved telling everyone about it.

What do people who have a dull singing voice, contract syphilis, and die suddenly have in common?

Well, according to a book (with the longest title EVER) published in the 18th century by James Morison, the answer was quite simple. Not enough poo.

Born in Aberdeenshire in 1770, James Morison was a bit blocked up. Well, more than a bit. For 35 years, he lived in inexpressible suffering. Having tried every course of treatment known to the medical establishment at the time and still no relief, Morrison’s agony forced him to take matters into his own hands. In 1825, he went to market selling his Vegetable Universal Medicine. Pills to purge yourself healthy!

A lesson every kid needs to learn is how to share. Little ones usually want everything for themselves, but as we grow and mature, we learn that sharing is caring. But there are some who have perhaps taken sharing too far.

Sperm donation. It’s a massive industry, helping hundreds of thousands of families enter into the joy of parenthood. Whether it's for altruistic reasons, the inherent desire to spread their wild oats, or just to earn some quick cash (2 minutes is all it takes), many men choose to donate.

But for whatever reason, some men seem to like living that donor lifestyle a little too much, popping off as much as they can to germinate their genes far and wide.

By the second half of the 20th century, humans were captivated by the idea of taming nature, making their mark on the world with colossal concrete structures. They’d gone absolutely - sorry about this - dam mad.

From democrats to dictators, the latest craze for politicians around the globe was to build dams. And for good reason! Dams are used to produce hydroelectricity, provide irrigation, protect against floods and give more work for more citizens. What could be bad about a dam? Well, many many things.

Every once in a while, somebody does something in the name of science that turns out to be really useful. Their research changes the world, a eureka moment catapults them onto the world stage for making scientific history. They might even be awarded a Nobel prize.

But what about the science we don’t hear about?

We don’t often witness the shock, the surprise, and, most importantly, the humour behind the scenes in moments of discovery. The things people set out to do that really matter to them and turn out to be hilarious. Enter the Ig Nobel Prizes.

Cereal, the food of the gods. Who can resist the crunchy, sugary deliciousness in a box? Kids (admit it - adults too) would eat it for every meal if they had the chance.

But have you ever wondered why you choose the cereal that you do? Did one in particular catch your eye?

There’s a heck of a lot of money that goes into marketing, especially products made for kids, and especially cereal. Fruit Loops, Coco Pops, Frosties - what do they all have in common? Those happy spokes characters on the box suggest to us how delicious the cereal is with their inviting facial expressions! It’s almost like they’re gazing right into your eyes telling you to pick them up and put them in your trolley.

While some people shuffle off this mortal coil in rather ordinary ways, there are those adventurous souls who seem hell-bent on making the grim reaper scratch his head in confusion. Like drowning in a pool of beer, throwing dynamite out the window of a moving vehicle (but forgetting to roll the window down), tripping on your world record breaking beard, and death during sex. Yes, that’s right. As much as we all like getting it on, there are some people throughout history who literally went out with a bang.

One question that pervaded the minds of early European physicians was not whether we should eat human flesh, but rather which part and how much. While cannibalism might conjure up images of wild savages, it turns out medical cannibalism was all the rage back in the day... and continues to be (say what?!).

Ahhh 1920s psychology… back when you could do anything in the name of science. Like traumatising a baby or making people believe they'd killed someone. The good old days. Picture this: It's 1924, and Carney Landis, a psych graduate student at Minnesota University, has an ambitious idea. He wanted to determine if humans had universal facial expressions for various emotions.

So did Landis reveal any universal facial expressions in response to his ever-escalating stimuli? Or did the aftermath of this classic 1920s psych experiment leave only electrocuted frogs, blown eardrums, and traumatised children?

When the doors of the Iroquois Theater opened in 1903, it was said to be the most beautiful in all of Chicago. A masterpiece adorned with mahogany and glass doors, marble and gold pillars, and a grand central staircase. Boasting a seating capacity of 1,600 people on three levels, the Iroquois promised a night of enchantment to all. Better still, it was declared in playbills and advertising to be “absolutely fireproof”.

Open plan workplaces. How do we feel about them? Now, we’re all up for modernism and advancement but when it comes to actually being able to get work done, open-plan workplaces SUCK. And there’s a lot of science to back that up. Basically, nobody gets shit done if they’re distracted all day long. The Isolator was designed to minimise visual reach, granting the wearer absolute concentration on whatever they were doing. Picture a helmet that looks like a cross between Darth Vader's headgear and a Victorian diving bell.

Imagine harnessing the power of the sun using nothing more than high school science lab equipment and household ingredients. Desktop cold fusion - it would be the biggest invention of the century! Well, that's exactly what Professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann thought they’d discovered in 1989. After experimenting with a palladium cathode in a simple heavy water electrolysis cell, they observed an unexpected rise in temperature. Confusingly, they concluded the solution was nuclear fusion! (Try saying that 3 times fast)

If you think cinema is just audiovisual entertainment, hold onto your popcorn folks, because today we're diving into an aromatic abyss of olfactory oddity when Hollywood engaged in the battle of the smellies. This isn't just a whiff of the absurd, but an honest-to-goodness tale of when Hollywood tried to tickle our nostrils along with our imagination. So did cinematic innovation cut the mustard or was it all just passing wind?