Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Armed with loads of imagination but limited means, the Romanian inventor Raul Oaida had, by the age of 21, made good on several far-out engineering ideas, including an air-powered car built from roughly half a million Lego pieces, and a small Lego spacecraft he successfully launched to heights of more than 20 miles. Made in conjunction with The Adaptors podcast, this short profile from the US director Flora Lichtman shows how Raul has made his wild dreams a reality using widely available resources, and how inventors like him could change the way we see innovation in the information age.
Director: Flora Lichtman
Website: The Adapters
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes