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The scientific practice of Kiana Frank, a microbiologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, melds contemporary techniques of empirical data-collection with Indigenous knowledge born of her Native Hawaiian heritage. In Decoding Ancestral Knowledge, Frank recalls how an ancient Hawaiian myth, handed down through oral tradition, led her to a scientific breakthrough with meaningful implications for managing and restoring local fishponds. Told via a combination of in-the-lab and in-the-field footage, as well as a touch of paper puppetry, the short documentary offers an intriguing look at how ancient ways of understanding the natural world can help shape a better future.
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
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Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
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Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
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Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes