How airborne microbes ride clouds, hop continents and even make it rain
Everywhere that scientists look, they seem to be finding creatures clinging to life in increasingly remote environments – from Antarctic ice to boiling hydrothermal vents at the bottom of oceans. However, biologists have only recently begun paying close attention to one of the planet’s most fascinating venues for life: the sky. A collaboration between the US filmmaker Flora Lichtman and the California Academy of Sciences’ digital publication bioGraphic, the short film Life in the Clouds examines the complex and utterly fascinating ecosystems far above our heads.
videoBiology
What would it mean if we were able to ‘speak’ with whales?
65 minutes
videoBiology
For 3 billion years, life was unicellular. Why did it start to collaborate?
4 minutes
videoBiology
Dive deep into an egg cell to see how ageing reboots when a new life begins
2 minutes
videoMathematics
After centuries of trying, we’ve yet to arrive at a perfect way to map colour
20 minutes
videoEcology and environmental sciences
Join endangered whooping cranes on their perilous migratory path over North America
6 minutes
videoEnvironmental history
In Kazakhstan, ‘atomic lakes’ still scar the landscape decades after Soviet nuclear tests
13 minutes
videoMeaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
videoAnimals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
14 minutes
videoEarth science and climate
Images carved into film form a haunting elegy for a disappearing slice of Earth
3 minutes