We’d never heard of a ‘fleshing wheel’ until we spoke to taxidermist Ryan Hanley for Smith Journal volume one.

"The good things in life still exist" is both the word and deed of Germany company Manufactum, which sources purposeful objects that are made using traditional manufacturing methods and materials.

You can study at fancy schools for years or you can just start making stuff at home. Butch Anthony chose the latter.

Extravagantly haired social theorist and raconteur Malcolm Gladwell made his return to the TED conference with this heartwarming story of the Norden bombsight, a revolutionary device designed to make carpet-bombing a little less indiscriminate circa World War II.

If you love something you set it free, right? Not always. According to the man behind Feather and Bone, Grant Hilliard, if you’re going to eat something then you should at least know where it came from, how it was raised and the way it died.

Bob Swerer Sr. is an outdoorsman first and filmmaker second. Based at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Bob Sr’s films document the wild just outside his doorstep and the frozen Alaskan ‘beyond’. It was through these films that we discovered Richard (Dick) Proenneke who we featured in Smith Journal volume one.

While most of us were blissfully unaware of the existence of the Parkes radio telescope until the release of that 2000 film, The Dish, this venerable 64m wide metallic hemisphere has been purring along at the forefront of Australian astronomy for exactly half a century.

Sometime back in the 1970s, the tiny Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan decided to replace their Gross National Product with a measure of Gross National Happiness.

Even now, a trip to Antarctica isn’t all beer and skittles. Yes, modern-day scientists and explorers swaddle themselves in North Face and pack their protein bars, but frostbite is frostbite, however you measure it (with gangrenous fingers, perhaps?).

The music of Sigur Rós has always had a tenuous relationship with words.