Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
How is the human body able to produce antibodies to mount a defence against any attacking microorganism – even those it’s never encountered before? After all, our mere 20,000 genes seem woefully inadequate to produce the billions of different antibodies necessary to fight every possible disease. The problem stumped researchers for decades until the Japanese scientist Susumu Tonegawa discovered the key to our incredible adaptive capacity for fighting contagions – an accomplishment that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987. The answer, explored in this brief animation from Nature, lies in recombination-activating genes (RAGs) – DNA-‘shuffling’ enzymes that can create proteins capable of fighting any foreign invader.
Video by Nature
Animator: Dog & Rabbit
video
Illness and disease
Humanity eradicated smallpox 45 years ago. It’s a story worth remembering
25 minutes
video
Cognition and intelligence
A father forgets his child’s name for the first time in this poetic reflection on memory
4 minutes
video
Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes
video
Medicine
Why surgery and barbering were one occupation in the Middle Ages
6 minutes
video
Biography and memoir
As her world unravels, Pilar wonders at the ‘sacred geometry’ that gives it structure
20 minutes
video
Biology
In 1886, a US agency set out to record new fruit varieties. The results are wondrous
5 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned
10 minutes
video
Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
video
Social psychology
Social contagions can cause genuine illness, and TikTok may be a superspreader
10 minutes