Browsing: April

A Brief History On April 11, 1997, American action adventure horror film Anaconda was released in theaters in the United States by Sony Pictures Releasing.  Today, we take a flashback to the 20th Century to look at an entirely enjoyable film, campy, yes, but with a decent budget (for the time of $45 million and a cast featuring major stars. Digging Deeper The story finds us in the Amazon, with our heroes, played by Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, and Jonathan Hyde, searching for a mysterious and almost mythical remote tribe in the dense jungle bordering…

A Brief History On April 29, 1953, Los Angeles television station KECA made the first public experimental broadcast of a 3D TV show, an episode of Space Patrol.  Sadly, this attempt did not usher in an era of 3D TV for the masses, but it was another step in the advancements that have brought 3D TV to where it is today. Digging Deeper You may be surprised to know that the origins of 3D viewing go back to the 1800s, with a series of inventions concerning stereoscopic viewing of still pictures developed into moving 3D pictures of a sort with…

A Brief History On April 25, 2025, Until Dawn was released in the United States by Sony Pictures Releasing. Digging Deeper Based on the 2015 interactive video game by the same name, Until Dawn is a sort of Groundhog Day film, where the characters, 20 somethings of mixed gender, are out in a remote cabin in the woods trying desperately to survive until dawn against supernatural forces. The Groundhog Day aspect comes into play as a “time loop,” each time a character gets killed, they are resurrected to have another go at surviving until dawn up to a maximum of 13 times. …

A Brief History On April 20, 2023, the giant SpaceX Starship rocket booster vehicle proudly made its first flight, although the huge and hugely expensive rocket blew up only four minutes into that maiden flight! Digging Deeper The most powerful rocket ever made, the Starship’s price per unit is hard to pin down, although the project cost is a whopping $5 billion.  Towering 397 feet tall with a diameter of 30 feet, the giant rocket weighs 11 million pounds! Designed to replace SpaceX’s previous rockets, the Falcon series, Starship is expected to provide the heavy lifting needed to launch the…

A Brief History On April 15, 1923, the hormone insulin became widely available for the treatment of diabetes.  Prior to the discovery of insulin and its adaptation for medical use, diabetes was an often-fatal disease of the inability of the body to process glucose. Digging Deeper Even today, diabetes claims millions of lives per year, as well as causing a variety of related maladies such as kidney failure, blindness, and nerve damage.  Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas, and was discovered in 1921 by Frederick Banting of Canada, a Nobel Prize winning discovery. By 1923, insulin became available…