Popular Science J-5-1
★ 10 · 1935 · 11m · Documentary
Considers marvels of modern science: contact lenses, kitchen gadgets, bubble bath (with cheesecake), diatoms, Boulder Dam.
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Out of Plain Sight
2024 · ★ 10
From the Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Rosanna Xia, OUT OF PLAIN SIGHT is a cinematic exposé of an environmental disaster lurking just off the coast of Southern California. Not far from Catalina Island, aboard one of the most-advanced research ships in the world, David Valentine discovered a corroded barrel on the seafloor that gave him chills. The full environmental horror sharpens into greater clarity once he calls Xia, who pieces together a shocking revelation: In the years after World War II, as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been quietly dumped into the ocean – and the consequences continue to haunt the world today.
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Healthcaring from Our End of the Speculum
1976 · ★ 10
Healthcaring is a short documentary that focuses on the historical and contemporary abuses women have suffered at the hands of mostly male practitioners, and depicts solutions women find to lack of access to comprehensive health care in the 1970s.
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LSD-25
1967 · ★ 7.5
The dangers of LSD are driven home to teenagers in this classroom training film, which is "narrated" by an LSD tab. The "tab" tells kids that he is "a depth charge in the mind!" and various teenagers are shwn babbling about their LSD experiences. "Experts" are presented who warn that LSD makes kids "paint themselves green" and has various other horrible side effects, the most serious of which is that it gives users a police record, and that there is "no known way of getting your fingerprints out of a police file once they're in there."
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The Unpredictable Factor
2022
In today's climate debate, there is only one factor that cannot be calculated in climate models - humans. How can we nevertheless understand our role in the climate system and manage the crisis? Climate change is a complex global problem. Increasingly extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and more difficult living conditions - including for us humans - are already the order of the day. Global society has never faced such a complex challenge. For young people in particular, the frightening climate scenarios will be a reality in the future. For the global south, it is already today. To overcome this crisis, different perspectives are needed. "THE UNPREDICTABLE FACTOR" goes back to the origins of the German environmental movement, accompanies today's activists in the Rhineland in their fight against the coal industry and gives a voice to scientists from climate research, ethnology and psychology.
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ZUT – Zones Urgentes à Transformer
2022
Marie-Thérèse and Christian have turned their town into a ZUT—a Urgent Zones to Transform. They want pesticides gone. Completely. Immediately. And forever. The radical stance of these 'zutists' echoes a growing thirst for change across Belgium. From tiny garden plots to European institutions, from farm to farm, from laboratories to grassroots struggles, ZUT keep popping up—each one revealing just how dependent we’ve become on chemical inputs, and how deeply we long to break free.
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Microcosmos
1996 · ★ 7.6
A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.
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Bill Nye: Science Guy
2017 · ★ 6.4
Bill Nye is retiring his kid show act in a bid to become more like his late professor, astronomer Carl Sagan. Sagan dreamed of launching a spacecraft that could revolutionize interplanetary exploration. Bill sets out to accomplish Sagan's mission, but he is pulled away when he is challenged by evolution and climate change contrarians to defend the scientific consensus. Can Bill show the world why science matters in a culture increasingly indifferent to evidence?
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Is Anybody Out There?
2015 · ★ 5
The recent discovery by the Kepler satellite of thousands of Earth-like planets where life could be possible, has given a big boost to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In 2011, for the first time ever, Kepler provided us with a census of the Milky Way. We can now calculate how many stars in the Milky Way could have a planet like ours: around a billion.
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