Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
The early ancestors of plants were simple forms of algae, which drifted rootless through fresh waters. Most biologists believe that, only when algae partnered with a very different life form – fungi – some 470 million years ago, was it able thrive on land. Indeed, today some nine in 10 land plants exist in symbiosis with what’s known as ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi, which helps their roots to extract nutrients from the ground. This animation from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation details how this hidden relationship operates, the vital role these underground fungal networks play in ecosystems worldwide, and the threats they currently face due to human activity.
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
Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes