Tensions between architectural preservation and urban renewal collide at a demolition site

The Georgia Archives building, also known as the ‘White Ice Cube’ for its pale hue, windowless facade and modernist shape, was a prominent feature of Atlanta’s cityscape before the building’s controlled implosion in March 2017. Standing beside the State Capitol since 1965, it stored Georgia’s archival records until structural issues and budget cuts forced its 2012 closure and eventual demolition. This experimental short from the Atlanta-based filmmaker Adam Forrester captures the building’s destruction in a single shot played in reverse, giving the effect of something emerging from a cloud of smoke to self-assemble into a building. According to Forrester, the video uses this once ‘beautiful and bizarre component’ of the downtown Atlanta landscape to explore ‘our desire to preserve the past, our appetite to make way for the future, and the complex intersection of those urges’.

How a scientific attempt to demystify Buddhist meditation yielded astounding results

In 1981, Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, set out to study the ancient meditation practices of Buddhist monks on the Tibetan Plateau. With the Dalai Lama’s blessing, Benson spent roughly a decade in remote regions of the Himalayas in northern India researching an especially intense technique known as tummo, as well as the physiological effects of other advanced forms of meditation. Rather than debunking the seemingly tall tales of advanced practitioners capable of raising their body temperatures to dry cold, wet sheets around their bodies, Benson’s work actually confirmed and expanded upon these anecdotes. In particular, by tracking vital signs and body-heat output during meditation sessions, Benson found that these monks possessed remarkable capacities for controlling their oxygen intake, body temperatures and even brainwaves. In 2013, a second study conducted on advanced Tibetan tummo meditators by Maria Kozhevnikov, a cognitive neuroscientist the National University of Singapore, corroborated much of what Benson had observed, including practitioners’ ability to raise their body temperatures to feverish levels by combining visualisation and specialised breathing.

This extended trailer for the UK filmmaker Russ Pariseau’s feature documentary Advanced Tibetan Meditation: The Investigations of Herbert Benson MD relays portions of Benson’s landmark research, which ultimately signalled a seismic shift in how Western science views Buddhist meditation. Simultaneously, the material makes evident the disparate ways that Western scientists and Tibetan Buddhists understand the self.

Time seems to accelerate as we get older, but there’s a tested way to tap the brakes

Most adults seem to agree that the older you get, the quicker time flies by. This feeling might, on its surface, seem like one of life’s more enigmatic qualities. But according to the US neuroscientist David Eagleman, there’s actually a pretty straightforward scientific explanation for this phenomenon: habitual situations require much less of our attention than novel ones and, as we age, we become much more likely to be fixed in our routines, and much less likely to encounter anything out of the ordinary. So, as Eagleman suggests in this animation from BBC Ideas, if you want to pump the brakes on your experience of time, try pursuing new experiences – large and small.

How the Rosetta space probe brings a distant comet into vivid focus

In 2004, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent the Rosetta space probe to explore the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, located beyond the asteroid belt, more than five times the Earth’s distance from the Sun. In 2014, the orbiter finally reached the comet, and a lander touched down on its nucleus – a first in human history – where it briefly gathered data before losing battery power. In this video, the Austrian filmmaker and photographer Christian Stangl pays tribute to Rosetta’s historic journey, digitally enhancing some of the 400,000 images released by ESA after the mission to create a remarkably vivid and visceral tour of the alien astral body.

How an American country music pioneer entered African mythology

In 1933, the US country music pioneer Jimmie Rodgers died of tuberculosis. Just 35 years old and at the peak of his career, his demise left a legacy of a life and career unfinished. This instalment from the US animator Drew Christie’s Drawn & Recorded series, which tells little-known stories from the annals of modern music history, recounts the improbable story of how, in death, Rodgers would go on to inspire not just luminaries of American music, but also the Kipsigis peoples of the Rift Valley in Kenya – whose folk music found its way back to the US decades later.