Rocket scientist-turned-coppersmith Jim Hamann’s devotion to cookware came from a beautiful vintage pot he found on a trip to France. After starting a business restoring copper pots and pans for others, he decided to begin handcrafting his own, honoring the methods and quality of the centuries-old tradition at his company Duparquet Copper Cookware.
Over the past few years a general nostalgia for the 1980s has infiltrated music, film, and television. I deeply love those gated reverb drums of the ’80s – you know that punchy percussive sound popularized by Phil Collins and Prince? So for my second episode of Vox Pop’s Earworm I spoke with two Berklee College of Music professors, Susan Rogers and Prince Charles Alexander, to figure out just how that sound came to be, what makes it so damn punchy, and why it’s back.
Trace the 9,000 year old history of the domestication of corn, or maize, and its effects on global agriculture.
Corn currently accounts for more than one tenth of our global crop production. And over 99% of cultivated corn is the exact same type: Yellow Dent #2. This means that humans grow more Yellow Dent #2 than any other plant on the planet. So how did this single variety of this single plant become the biggest success story in agricultural history? Chris Kniesly investigates the rise of this wonder-crop.
Lesson by Chris A. Kniesly, directed by Artrake Studio.
The largest insect migration in the world ends each year in Michoacán, Mexico. Millions of monarch butterflies travel from the United States and Canada to pass the cold months in the towering trees of this beautiful forest. On their incredible journey, the butterflies travel around 2,800 miles.
Watch this classic from the very beginning of film. — Douglas
Released on September 15th, 1914. Sometimes called the world’s oldest cartoon (erroneously), it is still the first to be created using keyframe animation. This movie required Winsor McCay and his assistant John A. Fitzsimmons (who traced the backgrounds) to create 10,000 drawings, which they inked on rice paper and mounted on cardboard.
Gertie is a dinosaur based on the Brontosaurus (nowadays known as Apatosaurus) skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History. McCay’s employer, William Randolph Hearst, was displeased with McCay’s success outside of the newspapers, and used his contractual power to reduce McCay’s stage activities.
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Amazing puppets in this short Great Big Story video. I am always amazed at the power of puppets and how puppeteers can bring them to life even when they remain visible in controlling their creations. — Douglas
Puppets—they’re child’s play, right? Spend five minutes watching Barnaby Dixon and you’ll surely disagree. At first, it might seem strange for a 26-year-old to be hand-building puppets in his bedroom and shooting videos of his performances for a living, but the puppet prodigy’s creations are completely original and totally addicting to watch. Barnaby started his career solely to make YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/barnabyd…), but recently hit it big after winning a 50,000 Euro grand prize on the German puppet talent show, “Die Puppenstars.”
