Hey everyone, this is the last episode of the Fall season.

We'll resume things in the spring.

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I recommend checking out the Science History Institute's

Excellent Distillations Podcast.

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slash Disappearing Spoon. See you in the spring.

Most scientific papers are bland, even bloodless.

Not John Calhouns. Calhoun titled his most famous paper, Death Squared.

And in it, he quotes from the fiery book of revelations

and invokes the dreaded four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Now, what sort of experiment could justify such thundering rhetoric?

An experiment about mice.

Seems like a stretch, right?

But in short, for this experiment, Calhoun built a mouse colony.

But not just any mouse colony.

This was a mouse utopia, a giant pen with everything a mouse could ever desire.

Plenty of food and water, a perfect climate,

reams of paper to make cozy nests.

He also kept away all predators and strained the mice to eliminate all disease.

A mouse could live to a ripe old age there and never worry about a thing.

Officially, Calhoun called this setup the mortality-inhibiting environment for mice.

...