Laxative Lunacy • 2022 • episode "S1E8" • Oops, I Changed the World

59:00

A majestic presence, towering over Paris for more than 130 years, the Eiffel Tower is an iconic symbol of 19th-century progress and grandeur. When it was built for the 1889 Paris world's fair, its creator, Gustave Eiffel, was at the height of his fame and ready to take on the dream of every engineer and architect - to build the world's tallest man-made structure. He had just two years, two months and five days to erect his 300-metre iron colossus. Drawing on three decades of civil engineering innovation and works across the globe, Eiffel, a magician of iron building, was perfectly poised for this extraordinary feat.

2024 • Technology

42:05

McLaren's high-tech production center is as remarkably distinctive as the handcrafted automobiles they design and produce, overtaking its Supercar rivals through the application of Formula One science and sophisticated production standards.

S1E2 • Super Factories • 2020 • Technology

56:20

Jason Silva is a positive futurist who wants us to be excited about "the adjacent possible" and the ways we need to embrace the coming technological changes -- the "tools" that will change us as a people and alter humankind.

S1E4 • Curiosity Retreats: 2015 Lectures • 2015 • Technology

55:41

Join Steven Johnson and consider how the invention of the mirror spurred on the Renaissance, how glass lenses allow us to reveal worlds within worlds and how, deep beneath the ocean, glass is essential to communication. Johnson learns about the daring exploits of glassmakers who were forced to work under threat of the death penalty, a physics teacher who liked to fire molten glass from a crossbow and a scientist whose tinkering with a glass lens allowed 600 million people to see a man set foot on the moon. The link between the worlds of art, science, astronomy, disease prevention and global communication starts with the little-known maverick innovators of glass.

S1E3 • How We Got to Now • 2014 • Technology

44:00

It's 1961 and the Soviets are dominating the Space Race. President Kennedy ups the stakes dramatically, giving NASA until the end of the decade to land a man on the moon. Led by Wernher von Braun, engineers across America work together to build a rocket that will get them to this seemingly impossible destination: the Saturn V. This is the remarkable story of the engineers who rose to the challenge to build the most complex and powerful machine ever made by man, and the impact their phenomenal achievements continue to have to this day.

S1E1 • America's Secret Space Heroes • 2017 • Technology

94:43

Explores state surveillance and digital social control in China by following the experiences of two families and a journalist. Zijuan Chen is fighting for the release of her imprisoned husband, human rights lawyer Weiping Chang, while trying to keep his memory alive for their son. Wenzu Li and her newly freed husband, Quanzhang Wang, struggle against surveillance that is not only stopping him from being able to work but also affecting ordinary tasks like taking their son to school. Journalist Sophie Xueqin Huang, a pivotal figure in bringing the Me Too movement to China, is at constant risk of arrest. Chinese film-maker Jialing Zhang gives an exclusive and previously impossible intimate insight into the interior of China and tells a deeply disturbing story of how the state uses technology to control its citizens as well as propaganda to convince its people to trust it.

2024 • Technology