Two weeks in Southwestern France. All footage was shot by Jon Bryant simply using a Canon 7D. You can also watch the video directly on Vimeo here.

Via @brainpicker.

Sundown in Southwestern France is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

This week, NASA rolled a big archive of historical images into Flickr Commons, giving users access to more than a half century of NASA’s photographic history. The images are divided into three neat sets – “Launch and Takeoff,” “Building NASA” and “Center Namesakes” – and they’re all copyright-free, meaning that you can share and use these images however you like. You can jump into the archive here and watch it grow over time. Thanks for the heads up @eugenephoto! They’re always appreciated…

NASA Lauches Photo Archive on Flickr is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Put simply, you’ll probably never see a noir film quite like this. Key Lime Pie was directed by Trevor Jimenez in 2007, and recommended on Twitter by Joaquin Baldwin, a talented young animator featured on Open Culture some months ago. It runs a quick 3 and a half minutes.

Animated Noir: Key Lime Pie is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Some of the most basic questions about human existence (how did we develop language? why do we love music and art but kill in war? how did we develop certain eating habits? etc.) come back to a more singular question: how are we different from chimpanzees? This question is slowly getting answered by some of today’s leading primatologists and evolutionary biologists, including Robert Sapolsky, Daniel Lieberman, Richard Wrangham, Jane Goodall, Steven Pinker, all featured above.

What Makes Us Human? is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Related FYIs: you can find many of HP Lovecraft’s writings online here. Thanks Julie for the recent heads up.

Also, you can download an audio version of Huxley narrating A Brave New World here.

Syllabus & Book List for Sci-Fi Newbies is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

This new video from Cambridge University, featuring archaeologist John Robb, gives you a quick and visually appealing introduction to how humans have understood something we take for granted – our own bodies. Covering 10,000 years in six minutes, Robb takes us from the “Animal Body” and “Sexualized Body” of the Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, to the “Politicized Body” of the Classical Age, “God’s Body” of the Middle Ages, and finally “The Body as Machine,” the metaphor we have been living with since 1500. And we wrap up with the “Body Digital,” the body of the future, and “Multiple Bodies.” This video comes from the Cambridge Ideas series available on Cambridge’s YouTube channel.

Seven Ages of the Body is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Philip Roth, now 77 years old, keeps publishing with a certain urgency. Everyman in 2006, Exit Ghost in 2007, Indignation 2008, The Humbling last year, and next comes Nemesis, due to be released in early October. After The Humbling hit the shelves, magazine editor Tina Brown conducted a rare video interview with Roth, and they covered a fair amount of ground in 14 minutes: his creative surge, how he approaches writing sex scenes, Obama’s literary talents, the coming extinction of the novel and whether the Kindle can make any bit of difference, etc. You can watch the video above, or read a transcript here.

Now a little freebie. A nice copy of Indignation goes to the first reader who sends along a compelling piece of open/intelligent media that we choose to post on the site. (If you’re looking for more guidance on what we have in mind, please read the tips on this page.) You can submit your media picks here. Cheers…

Philip Roth’s Creative Surge & the Death of the Novel is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

The video says it all. CNN has more on Captain Jack…

via Alec Couros aka @courosa

The Power of Music is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Back in 1983, the BBC aired Fun to Imagine, a television series hosted by Richard Feynman that used physics to explain how the everyday world works – “why rubber bands are stretchy, why tennis balls can’t bounce forever, and what you’re really seeing when you look in the mirror.” In case you’re not familiar with him, Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist who had a gift for many things, including popularizing science and particularly physics. The clip above comes from Fun to Imagine, and thanks to this dedicated BBC website, you can now watch all six videos in the series, each running about 12 minutes.  If you’re looking for more Feynman videos, let me give you this: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, an hour-long BBC/PBS program from 1981, and Feynman’s legendary lectures on physics taped in 1964, now posted online courtesy of Bill Gates. And, oh yes, don’t forget Feynman playing the bongos too…

Want to study some physics? Get Free Physics courses here. And Free Physics Textbooks here.

Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

As journalists try to find their footing in the new digital environment, News21, a Carnegie and Knight initiative, has started “incubating” eight journalism schools across the country and helping students develop new forms of investigative reporting in multimedia formats. Above, we have Spilling Over, a piece of digital reporting that lays bare the emotional toll the BP Oil spill has taken on a Louisiana community. The eight minute video report was assembled by a News21 team at the University of North Carolina. NPR has more on the News21 project, and the News21 website features other student projects. H/T to Mike S. for another superb find…

Journalism for Our Century is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com