The guy who helped make The Land Before Time walked out of Disney in 1979 because he thought they were cheaping out on the drawings. Prada just hired him to hand-draw its Christmas ads. They even left his messy pencil sketches in the final photos. His name is John Pomeroy, and he started at Disney back in 1973. On September 13, 1979, he quit with Don Bluth and Gary Goldman right in the middle of making The Fox and the Hound. Their complaint was that the studio kept trimming the expensive detail work to save money. So they went off and started their own studio, with about $200,000 of equipment they paid for themselves. Around a quarter of Disney's animation department followed them out the door, and The Fox and the Hound got pushed back six months. That little rebel studio went on to make The Secret of NIMH, Dragon's Lair, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. Pomeroy came back to Disney in the 90s to lead the animation on John Smith in Pocahontas. Then he left again in 2003, when Disney shut down hand-drawn animation. Now look at what Coca-Cola did last Christmas. It made its holiday ad with AI and bragged about it. Coke said five people sorted through 70,000 AI clips and finished in about a month, when these ads used to take a year. Coke was probably right to do it. People online hated the ad, but when System1 tested it on regular viewers it scored 5.9 out of 6. If you sell soda in 140 countries, you want something cheap that feels like Christmas, and most people grabbing a Coke don't care how the polar bear got made. Prada sells something else entirely. When you buy a Prada bag, a big part of what you're paying for is knowing somebody spent way more than they needed to. Luxury has always worked like this. Before the sewing machine, nobody paid extra for a hand-stitched shirt, because every shirt was hand-stitched. Hand-stitching only got expensive once machines made it rare. AI is doing the same thing to pictures right now. Anybody can type a prompt and get a snowy forest with a cute fox in a couple of minutes. So a fox somebody actually drew, at roughly 12 drawings for every second of film, is suddenly worth a lot more. Those pencil sketches sitting behind the actors are Prada showing you the receipt. There's a hand-drawn fox walking through the snow in this campaign. Pomeroy quit Disney 47 years ago in the middle of a fox movie because he thought they were cutting corners on the drawings, and now Prada is paying him to draw a fox the slow way.

A high school girl in Mexico just won a gold medal for putting out fires with a speaker. It plays one deep, low hum and the flames die in about 5 seconds. DARPA tried the same idea back in 2012 with a rig so big and clunky they never took it any further, and hers runs on a 12-volt battery and a speaker she can carry around. Sound is just air being pushed back and forth. A low note at 30 hertz means the air around the flame is flipping direction 30 times every second. Flames only exist in a thin layer where fuel vapor mixes with oxygen. Shake that layer hard enough and it keeps getting stretched thinner, the heat gets pulled away faster than the flame can make more, and eventually the flame rips right off the fuel. Whatever tears off is too cool to keep burning, so it just goes out. DARPA's report put a number on how little it takes. Once the air at the flame is moving about half a meter per second, which is barely a breeze, the flame goes out, and pretty much any pitch can get there if you crank the power high enough. Low notes just get you there way cheaper, because a speaker moves a lot more air on each push when the pitch is low. Two engineering students at George Mason figured this out by trial and error in 2015. They started with super high pitches, 20,000 to 30,000 hertz, and all the flames did was shiver. It only worked once they dropped down to 30 to 60 hertz, which is basically the bass on a hip-hop track. Ángela Karime's build is a 12-volt battery, a frequency generator, an amplifier and a speaker, tuned to 30 hertz. She named it Vortex Tech and talks about it shooting out little rings of air, and that's real physics. When loud, low sound gets pushed through a narrow opening, the air curls up into rings like a smoke ring, and those rings carry a puff of air way farther than the sound would get on its own. In her tests it put out small flames from about 2 meters away. She went through five prototypes and over 100 tests in about a year, and she says it's put out burning wood, flammable liquids, electronics and cooking oil. The cooking oil one is a big deal. Throw water on a grease fire and it flashes into steam and flings burning oil all over your kitchen, which is exactly the kind of fire where you'd want something that doesn't put anything into the pan. Now, sound can't cool anything down, so a big fire sitting on red-hot fuel can come right back the second the speaker shuts off. The George Mason guys worried about the same thing in 2015, and it's why this is still a prototype for small flames and the red extinguisher under your sink isn't going anywhere yet. Space might end up being where this matters first. Up there water floats off in blobs, while sound works the same with or without gravity, and acoustics researchers have already published experiments on fighting fires with sound on spacecraft. She's still in high school, and she's already working on a version that spots a fire and puts it out by itself. The gold in Indonesia also came with a special award that gets her into another international competition.