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In 1981, the US Department of Energy and the civil engineering company Bechtel Corp assembled a task force to help tackle the problem of how to warn future humans to stay away from radioactive nuclear waste sites thousands of years into the future. Perhaps the strangest solution came from the French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiologist Paolo Fabbri, who proposed genetically engineering cats to change colour in response to radiation, and creating a mythology of danger around those cats. An exploration of unusually creative problem-solving, the French director Benjamin Huguet’s film probes how the once-obscure, decades-old ‘ray-cat solution’ has recently found new life.
Director: Benjamin Huguet
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Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
8 minutes
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Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
15 minutes
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Metaphysics
Bertrand Russell wanted to kill off causation. Can contemporary philosophy rescue it?
8 minutes
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The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
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Ethics
How many monkeys is it worth sacrificing to save a human life?
6 minutes
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Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
8 minutes
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes
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History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
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Human rights and justice
Thirty years after one teenager shot another, is it time to forgive?
28 minutes