Showing results by narrator "Luca James Lee" in All Categories

Learn about the U.S. Federal Reserve with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. The Federal Reserve is stirring more excitement these days than is probably recommended for a central bank just shy of its 100th birthday. The Fed, tasked with fostering economic growth and price stability in the US, was ratified by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913.

When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, it was a lucky accident. He didn't realize at the time that penicillin would dramatically change the face of medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. Fleming was a researcher studying the natural antibacterial substances produced by the body. He had been working with the bacteria that caused boils. To study the bacteria he grew colonies of it on plates.

Learn the history of the Spanish Inquisition with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. The Spanish Inquisition was a governing authority started by the crown in the late-15th century. It included a network of spies who worked across the state to ensure Spaniards conformed to the accepted behaviour of traditional Catholic subjects. t was relentless in ensuring Catholic orthodoxy within Spain. But why was Spain so self-conscious in ensuring a singular religious identity?

Learn about the Seven Wonders of the World with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Twenty-five hundred years ago, people began to talk about the wondrous structures they had seen in their travels around the Mediterranean. In 222 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote an essay called "On the Seven Wonders".

Learn about the Tragedy of the Commons with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. The Tragedy of the Commons is a situation in which a jointly owned resource is overused or destroyed because each person takes more than they would if the resource was privately owned. With each individual acting independently, the combined pressure on the resource exceeds what is in the interests of the community as a whole.

Throughout the world, there are hundreds of lakes in which monsters are said to live. None of these lake monsters is more famous than the Loch Ness Monster, who is said to inhabit Loch Ness in Scotland.

Learn about the Stockholm Syndrome with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. At first glance, two of the most notorious bank robberies of the 1970s would seem to have nothing in common. They occurred eight months apart, for different motives, on opposite sides of the globe. But these two incidents would prove seminal to the development and understanding of a curious and once controversial psychological condition: the Stockholm Syndrome.

If you're watching a movie where a world-weary detective is having trouble with a "dame" or a "broad", and cigarette smoke is wafting through the scene - you're probably appreciating a bit of "film noir". Film noir literally means black film referring to both the look and the attitude of these movies.

Crop circles are geometric patterns found in agricultural fields, most often in Southern England. They consist of flattened plant stems lying in regular patterns, some of which are highly complex. Crop circles usually appear in fields of wheat, barley, canola and other common crops. Because of their size - hundreds of feet across - crop circles can only be truly appreciated from the air.

Super robots to schoolgirls, Astroboy cute to violent realism, Pokemon to pornography. All of these different images, stories and types of entertainment, in cartoon form, can be called "anime". The term anime covers an enormous range of animation. The style is vast, steeped in history, and ever evolving.

Learn about UFOs with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. On 25 June 1947, Kenneth Arnold, a United States Forest Service employee and private pilot, witnessed nine Unidentified Flying Objects in the sky near Mount Rainier, Washington. This incident was to mark the beginning of a rapid increase in public interest in UFOs. Arnold, who at the time was searching for a downed transport plane, originally thought the objects he saw were jets. However, on closer inspection, he realised the objects had no tails and all but one looked like flat disks.

The story behind D-Day begins in 1939 when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, attacked Poland and ignited World War Two. The following year, the Germans occupied France and Western Europe and launched a vicious air war against Britain. In 1941, they invaded the Soviet Union. Seemingly unstoppable, the Nazis now held virtually all of Europe. However, by 1943, the tide had begun to turn in favor of the Allies, the forces opposed to Germany.

Learn about landing a man on the Moon with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. When the Cold War was at its height in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. and Russia were fierce rivals. So, with burgeoning technology making flying safer and easier, these two world powers embarked on a "space race" to see who could be the first to launch a man into space - and eventually to put a man on the Moon.

Learn about Route 66 with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Route 66 is arguably the most famous road in the United States of America. Stretching 2448 miles across much of the country, from Chicago in the East to Los Angeles in the West, it was also America's longest road.

Learn the history of Stonehenge with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Five thousand years ago, at the same time as the pyramids were being constructed in Egypt, another monolithic structure was being built in the English county now known as Wiltshire. This structure, a complex series of earthworks and towering standing stones, is one of Europe's most famous prehistoric sites.

Lehman Brothers Holding Co. was the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank before the firm's spectacular collapse in 2008. Lehman's global businesses previously generated more than $19 billion in 2007 from its vast capital markets, investment banking and investment management businesses. Lehman's Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing on September 15, 2008 marked one of the largest bankruptcies in U.S. history.

The Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp was set up by the U.S. government as a detention facility for "unlawful enemy combatants" captured in the "war on terror". Opened in 2002, it is located on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It is said that when Joan of Arc was born on January 6 in 1412, the roosters in her village all crowed, even though it was midnight. When Joan was 13 years old, something happened to change her life. She was working in the garden when she thought she saw a bright light coming from the church, and heard someone speaking French in a sweet, low, beautiful voice.

Epidemics are important to us as humans because they affect our very survival. Knowing what they are and how to control them have been of interest to us for centuries. A simple explanation of the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic would be to say that an epidemic is the large-scale transmission of an illness, whereas a pandemic is an epidemic that spreads across several countries.

"Bay of Pigs" refers to the 1961 invasion of Cuba by a force of CIA-backed Cuban exiles attempting to overthrow Fidel Castro's left-wing government. In Cuba the invasion is called the Battle of Girón, one of the beaches in the Bay of Pigs, which is on the south coast of Cuba. The invasion was one of the flashpoints of the Cold War and pushed the world towards the brink of nuclear war.