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
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoEthics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes
videoMedicine
Drinking wine from toxic cups was the 17th century’s own dubious ‘detox’ treatment
11 minutes
videoEngineering
How water-based clocks revolutionised the way we measure time
10 minutes
videoKnowledge
Why David Deutsch believes good explanations are the antidote to bad philosophy
10 minutes
videoEngineering
Building a prosperous future demands bold ideas. These are some of the boldest
40 minutes
videoEnvironmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
videoChildhood and adolescence
‘Do worms cry?’ – and other questions collected from the mind of a curious child
4 minutes
videoArchitecture
A 3D rendering of the Colosseum captures its architectural genius and symbolic power
17 minutes