The first challenge: coming up with a great story. For inspiration, the creative team leaves the Pixar campus and heads to the Poet’s Loft, a cabin 50 miles north of San Francisco. They thought they already had a great start on the plot for Toy Story 3, but after 20 minutes, the whole thing is scrapped. By day two, a new idea emerges—how would the toys feel if Andy, their owner, left for college?
/ Day / 3
Working from a series of plot points, screenwriter Michael Arndt begins drafting the script. At the same time, director Lee Unkrich and the story artists start sketching storyboards for each scene. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book. But the storyboards allow the filmmakers to begin imagining the look and feel of each scene.
It ain’t easy being cheesy. Mr. Cheetah first made this sage observation back in the ’80s, and it certainly still applies to the manufacture of his favorite bright-orange snack. Turning a hunk of cornmeal into a knobby Cheeto may take only a few minutes, but it requires a fine-tuned industrial dance that leaves no room for error. Frito-Lay’s quality-control folks will not tolerate anything less than maximum crunchiness.
MINUTES ELAPSED
0:00 to 1:00
Gritty cornmeal stored in a silo is pumped about 100 yards through a pneumatic tube into a Cheetos manufacturing plant. (Frito-Lay has 14 fried-Cheeto plants in 11 states.) The cornmeal then enters a giant hopper, where it awaits its rapid transformation into one of America’s most beloved snacks.
1/ Oxygen purge
From tanks on the ground, crews fill the shuttle’s payload bay and aft compartment with gaseous nitrogen to lower oxygen levels — on Apollo 1, oxygen on board caught fire during a test and killed the crew. A proper oxygen purge necessitates a stable flow rate of 180 pounds per minute. Should the concentration of nitrogen leaving the orbiter’s vent doors change at any time during the countdown, then the hazardous gas detection engineer must alert the team responsible for monitoring the payload bay.2/ Launch status check
Team leaders, including the flight director in Houston, give verbal confirmation that all systems are go. Here’s a breakdown of everyone who must sign off and for what systems:
The Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, is exactly what it sounds like: a guest lodge built out of frozen water. The whole thing—bar, chapel, and accommodations for 100 guests—must be rebuilt annually, for obvious reasons.
March
The Icehotel constructed last year is still open for business—the spring thaw comes late 125 miles north of the arctic circle—but this is the time to gather raw material for next year’s structure. Workers use hydraulic saws to slice the surface of the nearby Torne river into 3-foot-thick blocks, which are extracted with earthmoving equipment.
In the movies, criminals are transported in 10-car convoys with decoys, helicopter escorts, and an army of well-coiffed agents in black suits. (Somehow the prisoner still manages to escape and uncover the real culprit and clear his name!) Given the size of the US prison population—at almost 2 million, the largest in the world—the reality is a less exciting affair. Last year, the US Marshals Service shuttled 350,000 prisoners around the country, often to stand trial or serve as witnesses. Here’s how they do it.
Air Travel
The US Marshals Service [] operates the biggest prison transport network [
] in the world, called JPATS (Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System), headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. JPATS has its own fleet of 10 planes, ranging from a six-person Beechcraft 99 to an MD-80 that can carry about 140 inmates [
] . (Yes, it’s nicknamed Con Air.)
Comedy! Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic. Yet even after I discovered that repeating memorized Steve Martin routines failed to make me popular at the one junior-high party I was invited to, I kept trying. In 1999 I took stand-up out of my everyday conversations and started performing it in professional venues. I’m still fascinated by the evolutionary arc of an act. You know instantly whether something works. You can tweak it on the fly or die trying. (Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why.) But the coolest part is that if you ask any 10 comics how to put together an act, you’ll get 10 different answers. The joke development process is as unique and personal as each laugh it intends to evoke.
Get an Idea
This is the worst part of the process. Comedy protons have to collide in my brain by chance. Jerry Seinfeld can sit down and write for a full workday, like it’s a desk job. Zach Galifianakis thinks of stuff while mowing his farm (for reals). “It’s good to force your brain sometimes,” Steven Wright says. “It’s a muscle. You gotta work it out.” Once something happens for me—usually while I’m driving or in the shower—I scribble it down on the nearest surface.
From barnacles that hijack crabs to a protozoan that makes rodents cozy up to cats, parasites do a lot more than make you puke. But for sheer gross-out glory, it’s hard to beat Leucochloridium paradoxum. These flatworms live in birds’ rectums, and they give garden snails a glimpse of hell.
1/ A grazing snail eats a bird dropping. Gross, right? Well, what’s even grosser is that the dropping is filled with parasite eggs. Garden snails can’t digest the eggs. They survive their trip through the snail’s tummy intact and spread to nearby organs.
2/ The invading Leucochloridium runs through a couple of life-cycle stages before landing in the snail’s hepatopancreas, the organ that passes for its liver-pancreas-thing.
3/ The parasite pumps embryo after embryo into fat, throbbing brood sacs it builds in the snail’s eyestalks.
Thanks to the ever-shortening product upgrade cycle, the US generates about 2 million tons of electronic waste each year. Many discarded cell phones are shipped abroad, where valuable parts are stripped out and toxic metals are burned or dumped. But most domestic recyclers are more responsible. Here’s how one New York outfit, WeRecycle, does it.
1/ Collect A consumer drops a phone into a receptacle, and it’s trucked to one of WeRecycle’s facilities in New York or Connecticut.
2/ Sort Staffers pick through the phones, removing working units and wiping data from them. These are sold to domestic resellers, who offer them as refurbished models.
Close-quarters battle is a delicate, deadly ballet: Operators must move in precise patterns but still be ready to improvise. Brian Bishop, an ex-Marine who co-runs Combative Concepts in San Diego, has trained SEAL teams, Secret Service agents, and others in close-quarters battle since 1990. He and a former SEAL turned contract-trainer who prefers to remain anonymous walked us through the basics. Here’s how a crack team of commandos might free a group of two hostages held by armed men in a fortified desert compound. Don’t try this at home.
Equipment
Today’s operators carry gas-operated, air-cooled, selective-fire M4 carbine rifles. They’re compact enough for indoor work, yet accurate up to 900 feet should the fight spill into the street. Several “breachers” also carry Remington 870 shotguns. Add to this M84 stun grenades, which kick out a pain-inducing 170 decibels of sound and a blinding 1 million candelas of light.
So your kid wants to know how babies are made? Don’t hem and haw or spin some yarn about birds and bees—break down the biochemistry. It’s true what they say: The sexiest organ is the brain.
1/ Attraction
When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the neurons of the ventral tegmentum start producing the neurotransmitter dopamine and pumping it to the caudate nucleus, the hypothalamus, and other brain regions. High levels of dopamine can induce the release of testosterone, which is associated with a drive to make babies.
Lots of musicians have studios; Trent Reznor [
Using a technique they perfected on NIN’s 2007 album, Year Zero, Reznor and producer Atticus Ross [] began by recording disparate families of musical noise. “We would create—with no preconceived notion of what it was going to sound like—several different rhythm sections or drumbeats and then chop between them to create something else,” Reznor says.