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XX files: animalia genitalia

6 minutes

Dani

8 minutes

The physarum experiments

5 minutes

Kierkegaard’s horror of doubt

7 minutes

Is our attention for sale?

4 minutes

A pioneering biologist explains the co-evolution of the vagina and penis

The Colombian-born evolutionary biologist Patty Brennan, assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, studies something that reliably makes her the centre of any conversation: vertebrate genitalia. Far from turning squeamish or becoming bored by the details of her research, she finds most people are deeply fascinated by the often strange and surprising details of animal sex. And they’re right to be: as Brennan says, no other biological structures have co-evolved as closely as the vagina and the penis. Part of a Science series highlighting the work of extraordinary women in science, this short video explores Brennan’s efforts to learn more about the intricacies of animal copulation by dissecting, moulding and 3D-modelling animal genitalia. In particular, Brennan has found there’s still much to be learned about vaginas, which are underrepresented in scientific diagrams and research. This gap in knowledge is due not only to the challenges of studying something that’s inside the body, but likely also because the study of biology hasn’t escaped the phallocentricity of society.

Video by Science

Producer: Nguyễn Khôi Nguyên

‘I hate giving you bad news’: when a daughter with breast cancer calls her mother

Danielle Hernandez is 30 and has Stage 4 breast cancer. As she calls her mother Violeta in Florida to deliver an update on her treatment from her home in Los Angeles, she oscillates between medical jargon and silver livings, with the more difficult pieces of information hidden in the subtext, only occasionally bubbling to the surface. This intimate conversation is captured by her roommate, the US filmmaker Lizzy Hogenson, in the short film Dani. Using a stop-motion technique that combines felt figures and claymation, Hogenson places her own veneer on the discussion, which is pierced by intermittent cracks of raw emotion, hard truths and silence. The result is at once affecting and distressing, as small moments of love, courage and pain spark and fade into uncertainty.

Director: Lizzy Hogenson

Producer: Kyle McClary

Creeping through mazes, repelling adversaries – the slow-motion smarts of slime moulds

To the naked eye, the organism Physarum polycephalum – commonly referred to as ‘slime mould’ – might seem an unexceptional creature, despite its bright-yellow glow, as its acellular existence is dedicated to tracking nutrients at a speed of 1mm per hour. But this protist’s surprising computational cunning becomes apparent when viewed in time-lapse, revealing a life form that seems to possess intelligence despite lacking a nervous system. Between 2009 and 2018, the UK artist and researcher Heather Barnett conducted a series of clever experiments in which she probed slime moulds’ capacities for forming complex tube networks and adjusting to obstacles. For this short film, Aeon Video compiled Barnett’s ‘creative collaborations’ with P polycephalum into a montage that builds in complexity, emphasising the slime moulds’ surprisingly sophisticated capacities for problem-solving.

Director: Heather Barnett

Sound designer: Graham Barton

Editor: Tamur Qutab

Want to think for yourself? Start with an agonising state of doubt, says Kierkegaard

Influenced by Socrates’ sense of irony, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) came to believe that a state of doubt – disorienting and horrifying as it could sometimes be – was the cornerstone of a sound philosophical practice. This scepticism of objective truth and ardent belief in thinking for oneself is omnipresent in his pseudonymous works, in which his assumed names sometimes even spar with one another. While amusing, the peculiar literary device also undercuts any sense that the works were written by a voice of authority. In this video from the London Review of Books, the British philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée traces the theme of doubt in Kierkegaard’s life and work using his unfinished, posthumously published novel Johannes Climacus: Or a Life of Doubt as a starting point.

Video by the London Review of Books

Producer: Anthony Wilks

A handful of executives control the ‘attention economy’. Time for attentive resistance

From fitness tracking devices to search engines, it’s easy to think of personalised technologies as convenient shortcuts and useful tools for working towards goals. But, argues James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and a former Google employee, the primary aim of personalised tech is to keep users coming back by any means necessary – and often in a way that encourages empty distraction. In this brief animation featuring audio from a 2017 lecture at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) in London, Williams makes the case that the consolidation of the ‘attention economy’ to just a handful of companies is an unprecedented and deeply fraught human experiment – and one that demands active, attentive resistance.

Video by the RSA

Director: Olga Makarchuk

A pioneering biologist explains the co-evolution of the vagina and penis

The Colombian-born evolutionary biologist Patty Brennan, assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College, studies something that reliably makes her the centre of any conversation: vertebrate genitalia. Far from turning squeamish or becoming bored by the details of her research, she finds most people are deeply fascinated by the often strange and surprising details of animal sex. And they’re right to be: as Brennan says, no other biological structures have co-evolved as closely as the vagina and the penis. Part of a Science series highlighting the work of extraordinary women in science, this short video explores Brennan’s efforts to learn more about the intricacies of animal copulation by dissecting, moulding and 3D-modelling animal genitalia. In particular, Brennan has found there’s still much to be learned about vaginas, which are underrepresented in scientific diagrams and research. This gap in knowledge is due not only to the challenges of studying something that’s inside the body, but likely also because the study of biology hasn’t escaped the phallocentricity of society.

Video by Science

Producer: Nguyễn Khôi Nguyên

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Detail of ‘Siege of the City’ by Jean Charlot, watercolour of a fresco at Chichén Itzá. The Maya mural from the Las Monjas building clearly shows a ship with the distinct wooden planks of a Viking boat © Jean Charlot/Artists Rights Society [ARS]; Copyright Agency, 2020

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