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The Linsenmaier Chrysididae collection at the Natur-Museum Luzern in Switzerland features some 250,000 insect species – a small slice of the roughly 10 million species that scientists believe currently exist across the planet. In While Darwin Sleeps… what begins as a droning tour of the collection transforms into a wild, vibrant display of dancing beetles, fluttering butterflies, fuzzy bees and a flurry of other insects. By rapidly cycling through some 3,500 photographs of various specimens, the UK filmmaker Paul Bush gives the effect of millions of years of evolution condensed into just a few minutes, almost as if pushing a single creature through a frenzied metamorphosis, or as Bush puts it: ‘like a mescaline vision dreamt by Charles Darwin’.
Director: Paul Bush
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Cognition and intelligence
What’s this buzz about bees having culture? Inside a groundbreaking experiment
8 minutes
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Earth science and climate
The only man permitted in Bhutan’s sacred mountains chronicles humanity’s impact
22 minutes
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Cosmology
The Indian astronomer whose innovative work on black holes was mocked at Cambridge
13 minutes
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Astronomy
Seven years later, what can we make of our first confirmed interstellar visitor?
59 minutes
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Physics
Is it possible to design a shape to roll along any fixed path?
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Biotechnology
The two women behind a world-changing scientific discovery
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Medicine
Why surgery and barbering were one occupation in the Middle Ages
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Space exploration
Mind-bending speed is the only way to reach the stars – here are three ways to do it
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Biography and memoir
As her world unravels, Pilar wonders at the ‘sacred geometry’ that gives it structure
20 minutes