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Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it’s often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting. In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff, both of the University of Paris-Saclay, offer surprisingly amusing accounts of their own experiences of the ‘letter’, the most common format for publishing research in physics. With Arene providing jaunty stop-motion visuals, The Researcher’s Article is an enlightening and lively paean to the process of adding a small drop to the well of scientific knowledge.
Director: Charlotte Arene
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Biology
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short
3 minutes
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Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
15 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
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Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
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Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes