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Found while cleaning out some tanks filled with alligators and sharks, suddenly a little baby orangutan appeared in the middle of the natural history collection at Naturalis in Leiden. Aram was named by the museum's General Director, making the small ‘boy’ an icon for the importance of collecting data while (modern) scientists try to research, understand and stop the huge loss of biodiversity.

The dodo and humans have lived together on Earth for exactly 80 years. Many claim that the dodo, an out-sized pigeon that couldn't fly, is the first animal to become extinct thanks to humans. Only 1 person has drawn a living dodo, a Dutch boy named Joris Joostensz Laerle, who landed on Mauritius around 1598. These are the first and only sketches in existence.

Two ultimate face-palm moments after fundamental, foolish and costly mistakes: In 1999, a space probe exploded into orbit around Mars.  Nasa engineers programmed the thruster's software in metric values and not in the British-American system of measurement. A 193 million dollar error. Closer to home. In 2023 Spaniards spent 258 million euros on new trains that are too wide for the tunnels they have to pass through.

What's not to like about this car? Move over Land Cruiser and forget about Land Rover. Produced in 1983, this particular type of Fiat Panda became immensely popular in the hills of Northern Italy. We can only dream of traversing deserts and mountains in this future ATLAS Collective company car.

We love Rop ánd his Wild Animals from day one. And always when a new one arises from his piece of wet paper, we feel good. Dangerous animals, smelly animals, noisy animals all become the best version of themselves. We stick with something Rop said the other day: ‘animals just do what they have to do, and they trust their gut.’  So let us be a bit more animal.

Of all the sake in the world, there's one we can't get enough of. Ine Mankai. Insane flavour, insane story. A graduation project for which Kuniko Mukai, one of the first female Master Brewers in Japan, used an extinct red rice variety. This sake became the great success of her family's brewery, Mukai Shuzō. We are obsessed. 

This is a sperm whale tooth, carved by a whaler perhaps. Imagine being bored on a ship at sea. You have an ivory tooth of a sperm whale in your pocket. A jackknife in your hand. John F Kennedy is known to have had a large collection of these carved teeth. One has been auctioned for $50,000. And now we want one too.

We think we know what silence sounds like. Until we enter another level. In the world's quietest room, noise has been reduced to -9.4 DB. No one lasts long in this so called dead room; the record stands at 45 minutes. Shouting does not help, the sound is largely absorbed. It must be so alienating, that we want to experience it ourselves of course.

In Peru, huge statues have been carved into the hard rocky soil. They are so big that they can only be admired from a plane. These geoglyphs are two thousand years old. Chief researcher Maria Reiche claims that the original inhabitants, the Nazca, were able to create these images because they possessed exceptional eyesight: telescope eyes. That's who we want to meet, people with telescope eyes.

When we started our research in Egypt for our series with Ruud Gullit we had the luck to be alone with this mask in ‘the old’ museum in Cairo. The moment we stared the young King in his eyes, something shifted. It was like looking into space, looking back in time. We realised, then and there, that this mask must be the most important piece of art ever made by human hands.