Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
If the competitive nature of existence ever gets you down, you might want to consider one leading theory of how complex life came to emerge in the first place. The endosymbiotic theory of mitochondrial origin (also known as symbiogenesis) is one of the leading theories for the development of eukaryotes – the nucleus-containing cells that are the building blocks of all multicellular organisms. According to the theory, narrated here by the biologist Rob Lue of Harvard University, it was a symbiotic partnership between two primitive cells that allowed them to thrive, develop organelles for specialised tasks, and eventually give rise to complex new lifeforms. In other words, cooperation was key – and it remains so today.
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes
video
Physics
Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen
12 minutes
video
Engineering
For one of nature’s great builders, finding a mate means weaving the perfect nest
4 minutes