No One Saw It Coming

• A Gossip Writer Invented the Renaissance!?

  What if Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo weren’t really the best artists of the Renaissance, they were just the subject of some really good PR? In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, TikToker and Art Historian Mary McGillivray tells host Marc Fennell (Stuff the British Stole, Mastermind) the story of a salty Italian gossip writer called Giorgio Vasari, whose writing still influences the way we think about art, and she asks us to question everything we think we know about what makes historic art and artists 'good'. This episode will make you question if the Renaissance, a period when art, literature and philosophy flourished, and the so-called cultural and intellectual rebirth in Europe, was just the product of some really good marketing. Binge all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming now on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.Get in touch:Got a story for us? We'd love to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]

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• The Nazi siege and the secret seeds

  Try to stop famine, or save your own life? This was the impossible choice facing the Russian scientists behind the world's first seed bank during World War 2, when the Soviet city of Leningrad came under siege by the Nazis. Food was so scarce at the time that throughout the city people were forced to eat wallpaper, boiled leather, even their own pets, to stay alive. But this set of Russian botanists, with their vaults full of seeds and hidden garden of plants, refused to eat them even as they starved to death. Their sacrifice ultimately saved species of plants and crops that plant breeders have since relied on to feed the world.In this episode of No One Saw it Coming, podcast host Marc Fennell speaks to award-winning writer and games critic Simon Parkin about the decision that botanist Nikolai Vavilov and his team made, that would go on to change millions of lives and the food we eat today.If you’ve binged all the episodes of No One Saw It Coming, listen to Marc’s other award-winning history podcast Stuff The British Stole, on the ABC listen app (Australia) or wherever you get your podcasts.Get in touch:Got a story for us? We'd love to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]

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• Where freestyle swimming really comes from

  At the beginning of the 20th century a new swimming stroke started to capture the world's attention. It was known as the 'Aussie crawl'. But what if its origins weren't really Australian at all?Guests: Gary Osmond – Associate Professor, Sports History at the University of Queensland.Dorothy Wickham - Editor/Curator of Melanesian News Network. You can learn more about the Roviana Lagoon Festival HERE. Get in touch:Got a story for us? We'd love to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]

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• The Scholarship for World Domination

  Bob Hawke, Bill Clinton, Malcolm Turnbull – all were recipients of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. But if Cecil Rhodes had gotten his way, they would have been part of a much bigger plan, for world domination.  Guest: Dr Jonny Steinberg - Senior Lecturer, Political Science at Yale University 

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• Naked Truth about X-Rays

  Before selfies, before CT scans, before social media filters and front-facing cameras… there was the x-ray. Discovered by accident in a 19th-century lab, it didn’t just revolutionise medicine, it ignited a cultural obsession with seeing inside ourselves and remains a powerful example of what can happen when knowledge is shared freely. Guest: Dr. Suzie Sheehy - Accelerator Physicist, Author, and Science Communicator. Author of The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments that Changed our World

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