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Violent plasma explosions from the Sun’s surface – known as coronal mass ejections – reverberate to the farthest reaches of our solar system. However, due to the Earth’s protective magnetosphere, most people don’t take note of these events unless a particularly powerful solar flare disrupts radio signals or produces colourful aurorae near the poles. Created as part of an art installation, this inventive, visceral short uses data collected from the University of Alberta’s CARISMA radio array to sonically and visually interpret a geomagnetic storm high in Earth’s atmosphere. Manifesting the data as a dynamic sculpture, the digital rendering captures the volatility of these usually unseen and unheard phenomena, hinting at their potentially destructive powers.
Directors: Ruth Jarman, Joe Gerhardt
Website: Semiconductor Films
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Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
3 minutes
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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?
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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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Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
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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