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With some 7 million dried plant specimens, the herbarium at Kew Gardens in London is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world. Building on the Linnaean system, through Darwin to DNA, scientists there have traced the relationship between plant life-forms and the timeline of their development over the ages – from algae to mosses to flowers. While the plant family tree is thought to be 95 per cent complete, this short documentary reveals that continuing to study plants gives us an important framework for asking questions about how our ecosystems actually work.
Video by Lonelyleap
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Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
3 minutes
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Metaphysics
Bertrand Russell wanted to kill off causation. Can contemporary philosophy rescue it?
8 minutes
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History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
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Biotechnology
What it’s like to wear a prosthetic that ‘feels’
6 minutes
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Chemistry
A square inch in a Petri dish becomes a grand stage for chemical transformations
4 minutes
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Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
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Physics
The tangled tale of how physicists built a groundbreaking wormhole in a lab
17 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination
5 minutes
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Social psychology
Social contagions can cause genuine illness, and TikTok may be a superspreader
10 minutes