sci-fi

BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.

BobbyBroccoli's first of three parts on Jan Hendrik Schon, the Bell Labs postdoc whose fabricated organic semiconductor results nearly won a Nobel Prize. It covers his rise and the context around Bell Labs.

hbomberguy's long video dissects the anti-vaccine movement, analyzing Andrew Wakefield's fraudulent MMR-autism study, the media's role and Wakefield's loss of his license. It combines detailed research with humor.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tours a Kodak factory to show how photographic film is manufactured. This is part one of a three-part series covering the large-scale coating and production process.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

Part 4 of the BBS: The Documentary series, covering FidoNet, the amateur network that linked dial-up bulletin board systems together to relay messages and files worldwide.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the ILFORD factory in Mobberley, England, showing how black and white film, paper and chemicals are made. It walks through emulsion making, coating, finishing, QC and distribution.

Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.

A Financial Times film examining how Brexit hurt the UK economy, with FT writers and business people. It looks at trade effects, political silence about the costs, and the absence of a convincing Brexit dividend.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

A dramatization of a hypothetical Soviet first strike that destroys US bombers and Minuteman missiles, filmed with US Air Force cooperation. It is a short version of the 1979 documentary First Strike.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

Official trailer for the documentary Into Eternity, about Finland's Onkalo repository, built to store high-level nuclear waste safely for 100,000 years. It raises how to warn and communicate with far-future humans.

An independent feature documentary in which 23 economists, advisers and financiers discuss how the financial system works and what a more just economic model might look like. It covers money creation, debt and the aftermath of the financial crisis.

A short Discovery nature clip from North America showing a red fox listening for field mice under the snow and then diving headfirst to catch them. The narration says the fox uses its hearing and the Earth's magnetic field to aim its jump.

The 1993 BBC Horizon documentary on Richard Feynman, using interviews with colleagues and Feynman's own storytelling. It covers his life and work through to his final illness.

A 2017 documentary filmed at the Santa Fe Institute in which novelist Cormac McCarthy talks with SFI's David Krakauer. They discuss isolation, mathematics, character and the nature of the unconscious.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

The first episode of James Burke's 1978 BBC series Connections traces modern dependence on complex technological networks, starting with the 1965 New York blackout, and moves through ancient agriculture to Kuwait's oil-driven leap.

A feature-length documentary on how the City of London and Britain's overseas territories built a global web of offshore secrecy jurisdictions after the empire declined. It traces how this network captured and hid wealth from around the world.

Atrocity Guide covers the 1965 dolphin experiments of Dr. John C. Lilly and Margaret Howe, who tried to teach dolphins English. It traces the bizarre methods and Lilly's later drug-fueled beliefs.

Kirby Ferguson's film argues that creativity is built from copying, transforming and combining existing works, examining music, film and technology. It makes the case that everything is a remix.

A 2008 documentary by Brett Whitcomb about the Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic band built for ShowBiz Pizza Place restaurants. It follows the band's history and the fans who keep the machines and their technology running.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

Cathode Ray Dude covers two bizarre HP 'Quick Start' features: QuickLook, an offline email client built on EFI firmware, and Daystarter, which hijacks the Windows boot process. It includes an explanation of EFI applications and why HP built these things.

Official trailer for Eugene Jarecki's 2012 documentary The House I Live In, an investigative look at America's war on drugs and its effect on the criminal justice system. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

The full 2010 documentary Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, examines the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. It traces the story through interviews with key financial and political players across several countries.

A VPRO documentary on quantitative analysts who designed the mathematical models and high-speed trading systems behind modern finance. It features figures such as Paul Wilmott and asks what risks come from treating markets as a machine.

The official trailer for The True Cost, a documentary on the fast fashion industry and who pays for cheap clothing. It touches on garment worker conditions and the Rana Plaza collapse.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

Trailer for the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight, shown at the Boston SciFi Film Festival. The film follows the engineers who keep the Voyager spacecraft running.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

A documentary about Vipassana meditation in India's Tihar Prison, led by Kiran Bedi, the prison's Inspector General. It follows inmates who went through the courses and the changes they describe.

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

Planet of the Humans, a full documentary by Jeff Gibbs presented by Michael Moore, arguing that the green movement has been co-opted by corporate and wealthy interests and that techno-fixes are not enough.

Veritasium tells the story of how Shuji Nakamura and others made the blue LED, long thought nearly impossible. It covers the materials challenge of gallium nitride and the persistence it took.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.