2020 has been an unprecedented year in science. From a global pandemic and race to find a cure, to exploring our planetary neighbours and our own world, stay in the know with the latest stories that defined this tumultuous year. 365 days marked by stark warnings about the planet's future and technological triumphs. During this journey around the sun, science continued to reveal stories of our past and also provide promise that we can overcome the obstacles in way some far ahead and others more immediate.
The film tells the story of an overlooked genius: Claude Shannon. In a blockbuster paper in 1948, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a 'bit' and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics. But when interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he'd constructed -- juggling robots, a Rubik's Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet -- than rehashing the past. Mixing contemporary interviews, archival film, animation and dialogue drawn from interviews conducted with Shannon himself, The Bit Player tells the story of an overlooked genius who revolutionized the world, but never lost his childlike curiosity.
Explore the hottest area of bioscience, genomics with stunning live image, quality CGI, the forefront research, and real human stories. Previously it was thought that only 2% of our DNA is meaningful and the remaining 98% is non-coding 'junk'. But today we are beginning to know how the junk part of our DNA works to decide our personal characteristics and tendencies.
Horses. Powerful, graceful, and thunderously fast. No animal has made a greater impact on society or given humans more freedom and mobility. In a spectacular adventure, the film unlocks the mystery of the first horse warriors on the vast, grassy plains of Kazakhstan, where horses still roam free, and nomadic herders follow their traditional way of life. Investigating clues from archaeology and genetics, researchers reveal vivid evidence of the very first horsemen. They also discover warriors who swept across Europe and turn out to be the ancestors of millions today.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli--the harmful bacteria that cause illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms' Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms' Joe Salatin, the film reveals surprising--and often shocking truths--about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
