Science

The idea that life on Earth originated elsewhere is not as far out as it seems

6 minutes

Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves

3 minutes

What it’s like to wear a prosthetic that ‘feels’

6 minutes

To understand the limits of human senses, look to the wild world of animal cognition

45 minutes

Symmetry rules life on Earth – but it comes with many fascinating exceptions

9 minutes

There’s no one way for an insect to fly, but they’re all amazing in close up and slo-mo

7 minutes

Fortune favours the shrewd

Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking

Lee Alan Dugatkin

Dazzling timelapse shows how microbes spoil our food – and sometimes enrich it

22 minutes

Like pop music, humpback whale songs spread, mutate, and fall out of fashion

9 minutes

A touch of moss

Inside a rainforest or on the city pavement, moss asks so little yet offers so much: a tactile encounter with time itself

Nikita Arora

Journey deep into the Philippine forest in search of the world’s largest, rarest eagle

95 minutes

Seeing life

Driven by insatiable curiosity, early histologists revealed the hidden structures of cells in works of sensual artistry

Benjamin Ehrlich

Experience the dazzling displays that fireflies create when humans are far away

5 minutes

In the jungle of Suriname, Maria Sibylla Merian discovered insect metamorphosis

4 minutes

The split-body problem

Why we need to stop thinking about parents, offspring and sex when we try to understand how life reproduces itself

Gunnar O Babcock

The master-of-disguise creature whose whole life is an elaborate lie

5 minutes

Slow sex, long life

Tokyo’s imperial archives advise what science now confirms: the secret of longevity lies in the gentle arts of the bedroom

Denis Noble

How to restore a savanna

Massive tree-planting programmes have come to substitute for the tradeoffs and complexity of restoring real ecosystems

Francis E (‘Jack’) Putz

How insects become airborne, slowed down to a speed the human eye can appreciate

8 minutes

It’s a massive, winged Cretaceous beast – could a human ride one?

9 minutes

The astonishing resonances between patterns in nature, microscopic and cosmic

5 minutes