Coin Box Christmas Houses

To Spring (1936) - Harman and Ising

To Spring, a Harman and Ising cartoon made in 1936 for Metro Goldwyn Mayer. The colors. The rhymes and music. The saga of a new season. The imagination…

What Counts as a Mountain? - Tom Scott

Mountains: super tall, rocky landforms that rise high above the surrounding environment, much higher than hills. We might draw one as a single peak like Mount Fuji, or as a zig zag line of peaks representing a mountain range. Mount Everest (also known as Sagarmāthā and Chomolungma) is Earth’s highest peak above sea level, but it’s also surrounded by tall mountains in the Mahālangūr range. Do those count as some of the tallest on Earth, too?

Tom Scott asks “what counts as a mountain” on the 4,350 meter (14,271 foot) peak of Mount Evans in Colorado, North America’s 41st highest. Then he explains the answer… mostly.

Read more about topographical prominence and edge cases.

Call to Arms Painting (The Turkey's Nightmare)

Elemental Burning - Beauty of Science

Envisioning Chemistry: Elemental Burning from Beauty of Science on Vimeo.

WARNING: A bit loud, so headphone users be warned.

What happens to carbon when it combusts? What does sodium look like while it burns? In Elemental Burning, creator Yan Liang’s team films the combustion of five elements: carbon, sodium, phosphorus, magnesium, and sulfur… and then see what compounds they change into afterward.

The video is another in the Beauty of Science video series, chemistry content created for K-12 STEM education. 

Tinker Friday - Dina A. Amin

What’s inside an old optical mouse? How many pieces are they made from? How might they be reimagined? Cairo-based product designer dina A. Amin made a hobby from these questions, turning it into a delightful side project that she calls Tinker Friday. She writes:

Every Friday I pick a random “about to be thrown away” product (from my growing collection of donated e-waste). I disassemble it, rearrange it back into something else and make a stop motion animation story out of its parts. I’ve been doing this for almost 8 months now, and made over 20 videos. I like to show people what’s inside their products in an interesting way. I think we rarely see what’s inside a product so we treat it as one whole piece, and it makes it easier to discard things; we throw away one thing and not many! But there are many things inside… and many possibilities!

Amin is brilliant at transforming these normally unseen pieces into adorable characters and bite-sized stories. Click each Instagram video to watch:

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What's inside my Euro Profile Lock?👀 Lonely lil creature 😢 what would you name him? #whpdaydream A big part of #TinkerFriday involves getting lost in my own head. When I take apart a product I lay every piece in front of me, I strip away all reality. This is not a spring, nor are these called pins. I start seeing all sorts of lil creatures coming alive, I imagine their world, what they'd do or how they'd feel. Sometimes those daydreams make sense, sometimes they don't. My stop motion videos is how I make these daydreams the new reality. Music: I'm so lonesome cover by William and Victoria

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on May 1, 2016 at 10:23am PDT

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What's inside my Cassette Tape? 👀 Lil creature knitting her eyes out! Any name suggestions? 😁 I was too ambitious and wanted to knit her a scarf.. Didn't even get to the second row 😂 #tinkerfriday

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on May 24, 2016 at 9:45am PDT

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What's inside my circuit breaker? 👀 A day in a lil's life! 👧🏻🐶🚗👖🌿 I need name suggestions!! 🙌🏼 Can you believe all this was inside! 😮 #tinkerfriday #whphiddenbeauty Song: All Night by @parovstelarofficial

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on May 16, 2016 at 9:04am PDT

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What's inside my Floppy disk? 👀 Lil pink slug and a floppy lil man! #tinkerfriday Hot pink slugs were recently discovered in Australia! 💗 They survived till today bec. they were separated from the rest of the world on mount Kaputar when the volcano erupted! Now they are amongst the top ten endangered species! Floppy lil man... what have you done! 😔 Inspired by @the_pink_slug

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on Jun 25, 2016 at 9:03am PDT

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What's inside my car audio cassette adaptor? 👀 #tinkerfriday Lil creature in tight👖What shall I call her? For some reason beyond my comprehension, this @jimmyfallon skit always cheers me up 😂 and I had a ffery ffrustrating day! Phew. #pareidolia #iseefaces #iseefacestoo #facehunter #faceseverywhere

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on Mar 6, 2016 at 11:28am PST

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Today is my Birthday ✨ Most people cant tell my age right 😆 Take a guess!! 😁 #shortgirlproblems

A post shared by dina A. Amin (@dina.a.amin) on Jun 14, 2016 at 5:44am PDT

Follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

Bamboo Backed Hickory Longbow

Making a Rice Straw Animal for the Wara Art Festival

A wooden framework and curved plastic pipes provide a solid structure for ‘knit’ bundles of wara or rice straw, the byproduct of the season’s rice harvest. As volunteers work together to tie and wrap the bundles into place, an oversized straw animal is revealed. It’s one of many specially designed sculptures created for the annual Wara Art Festival (わらアート) in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture. Spoon & Tamago provides some background:

The Wara Art Festival all started in 2006 when the local district reached out to Musashino Art University to seek guidance on transforming their abundant amount of rice straw into art. And in 2008, the very first Wara Art Festival was held. Since then, every year the school sends art students up to Niigata to assist in creating sculptures made out of rice straw. The festivities have ended but the sculptures are on display through October 31, 2017.

The Origin of Birds - Dr. Julia Clarke

Paleontologist Dr. Julia Clarke shares the evidence that connects modern-day birds with dinosaurs in this 19 minute exploration: The Origin of Birds. Also: Archaeopteryx, one of the most important fossils ever discovered.

The video belongs to HHMI BioInteractive‘s Great Transitions in Evolution, a series about the “fossils of animals with features that are intermediate between those of ancestral and modern groups–or transitional fossils–provide evidence for the evolutionary origin of key anatomical structures.” More about the video:

The discovery of Archaeopteryx in a quarry in Germany in the early 1860s provided the first clue that birds descended from reptiles. But what kind of reptile? In the last 40 years, scientists have identified many shared features between birds and two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs called theropods.

The film illustrates many of the practices of science, including asking important questions, formulating and testing hypotheses, analyzing and interpreting evidence, and revising explanations as new evidence becomes available.

HHMI BioInteractive also has an abbreviated film guide for educators [pdf], a transcript, and videos available for download.

Marie Tharp: Uncovering the Secrets of the Ocean Floor

In the early 20th century, Alfred Wegener proposed a revolutionary idea: that the Earth’s continents were once joined together, and had gradually moved apart. The idea contradicted almost everything scientists thought at the time, and it took the detailed work of a brilliant cartographer to prove him right. 

Conventional ideas held that the ocean floors were flat, featureless planes. As expeditions started to go around the world collecting ocean depth measurements, Marie Tharp – not allowed to join the expeditions herself – processed the data and began to craft detailed, revealing maps of the hidden ocean depths.

She discovered that the ocean floor was in fact a complex assortment of peaks and troughs. In particular, her profiles revealed stark rift valleys, which supported Wegener’s controversial ideas. Even then, it took a long time to convince the scientific community that her findings were correct. Eventually, however, she was proved right, and Marie Tharp took her rightful place as one of history’s finest cartographers.

From The Royal Institution, narrated by physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski, a revealing animation about American geologist and oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp: Uncovering the Secrets of the Ocean Floor.