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Aerogel is a manufactured material with the lowest bulk density of any known porous solid. It is derived from a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. The result is an extremely low-density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as a thermal insulator. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke, solid air or blue smoke due to its translucent nature and the way light scatters in the material.
Alpenglow is an optical phenomenon. When the sun is just below the horizon, a horizontal red glowing band can sometimes be observed on the opposite horizon. Alpenglow is easiest to observe when mountains are illuminated but can also be observed when the sky is illuminated through backscattering.
The peninsula of Araya in northeastern Venezuela, is one of the most arid places on earth. For five hundred years, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region's salt has been exploited manually. A 17th-century fortress built to protect against pirate raids stands as a reminder of the days when salt was worth almost as much as gold and great fortunes were made. This documentary captures the life of the salineros and their back-breaking work in breathtaking images.
Athenian pederasty entailed a formal bond between an adult man and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family, consisting of loving and often sexual relations. As an erotic and educational custom it was initially employed by the upper class as a means of teaching the young and conveying to them important cultural values, such as bravery and restraint.
Anthony Blunt was a British spy, art historian, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Surveyor of the King's Pictures. Blunt was an acclaimed art historian and the "Fourth Man" of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from some time in the 1930s to at least the early 1950s.
Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief, a sort of Cary Grant - if only Grant came from Transylvania, was a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper, and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s, while playing for the biggest hockey team in Budapest, Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. His opponents: a police chief who learned how to be a detective via dubbed episodes of Columbo; a deputy so dense he was known only by his Hungarian nickname, Mound of Asshead; and a forensics expert-cum-ballet teacher who wore a top hat and tails on the job.
Levi Fisher Ames decided to make his environment portable. A Civil War soldier, musician, carpenter, maker of musical instruments, prolific woodcarver, and animated storyteller, Ames hand carved his own impressive menagerie of over 600 domestic, wild, and mythical animals, carefully encasing each in a glass-fronted folding box. He exhibited them at regional fairs as a comprehensive sideshow in the belief that they needed to be seen as an interrelated work and that his storytelling was a central component of the whole.
Boris Artzybasheff was notable for his strongly worked and often surreal designs. He illustrated the major American magazines Life, Fortune, and Time. He painted 219 Time covers from 1942 to 1966, including portraits of Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck.
The Alcázar of Seville is a royal palace in Seville, Spain.
The interior designer Andrée Putman had an outlook of radical simplicity that made her seem perpetually modern. She provided interiors in 1985 for the office in Paris of the French minister of culture, with its half-moon desk, still in service and loved; in 1990 for Bordeaux's contemporary art museum; and in 1994 for a revamp of the cabin of Concorde. She also designed the sets for Peter Greenaway's 1996 film The Pillow Book.