Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
‘Chirality’ refers to a property of molecules that come in two distinct varieties – a ‘right-handed’ and ‘left-handed’ form. At first glance, this concept may seem like an esoteric bit of knowledge relevant only to lab chemists. However, the fact takes on a new meaning when you consider that, while chemical reactions tend to produce a 50:50 chiral mix of these molecules, the building blocks of life come in a single (or homochiral) form – and indeed must for life as we know it to operate. That’s all to say, at the core of the origin of life is a mystery of homochirality.
This film from the science documentary series Chemistry Shorts explores how the groundbreaking experiments of two Harvard University scientists, S Furkan Ozturk and Dimitar Sasselov, may have cracked the case of how the ‘prebiotic soup’ generated homochirality – and in doing so, made life possible. Balancing the chemical nitty-gritty of it all with the larger existential questions their work probes, the film makes for a riveting dive into a potential breakthrough on one of science’s most enduring mysteries.
Director: Page Buono
Website: Chemistry Shorts
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
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes
video
Physics
Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen
12 minutes
video
Engineering
For one of nature’s great builders, finding a mate means weaving the perfect nest
4 minutes