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Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin – PBS (2014)

March 24, 2017 at 4:06 pm / Evolution, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Your Inner Fish, is the first installment of a three part PBS series by Neil Shubin. After a quick review of our shared anatomy with the fish and a whirlwind tour along the evolutionary timeline, the program plunges us into the fascinating saga of discovery of the tetrapods that explains how limbs of the terrestrial vertebrates came to be. Watch how the legendary 375 million year old (Devonian) tetrapod fossil Tiktaalik was discovered after a series of adventurous Arctic expeditions. […]

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Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) on Board ISS – NASA/SVS (2017)

March 20, 2017 at 10:54 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video

NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Transport System is a remote-sensing instrument installed on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015. Using LIDAR technology it scans a vertical slice of the atmosphere for natural as well as human made aerosols and clouds. The near-real-time data transmitted from the ISS enables CATS team to process it within six hours. One of the natural aerosol sources is volcanoes. In April 2015, the CATS instrument provided a detailed profile of the south Chilean volcano Calbuco when it […]

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The Central Dogma of Biology – Kazufumi Watanabe (2008)

March 18, 2017 at 1:45 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Riken Omics Center from Japan presents a well-crafted animation that summarizes one of the most important subjects of biology since 1958. The central dogma is our first systematic approach in understanding nature of the information flow and manufacture of structures within a living cell. The viewer must be warned that the structures in this animation are artistic representations and in reality they look quite different from space ships. For example RNA Polymerase II is one of the most well-studied enzymes […]

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The World’s Most Boring TV … and Why It’s Hilariously Addictive – Thomas Hellum – TED Talk (2014)

March 12, 2017 at 1:23 pm / Technical Notes, Video

The idea of “slow-TV” was there. For years live cameras have been showing bears hunt fish in rivers, birds nesting and rearing their chicks with viewers in the millions. A Discovery Channel series called “Earth Sunrise” recorded a full hour of realtime sunrise in spectacular locations from around the world. Recording of a total solar eclipse in Brazil and Turkey was quite a memorable event. Slow-TV concept is a paradigm invented by real-time nature observers. The Norwegian television producer Thomas […]

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Chimpanzee – Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield (2012)

February 27, 2017 at 3:09 pm / Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

The Chimpanzee is a heavily anthropomorphosized docu-feature movie targeting young audiences. It was filmed on multiple locations including Taï National Park in southwestern Ivory Coast, Ngogo and Kibale national parks in Uganda and Gabon by two British nature filmmakers Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield. Martyn Colbeck was the person behind the camera. Tim Allen did the narration. Filmmakers stitched the footage recorded in these locations and consolidated into a single story creating a drama around an orphaned baby Chimpanzee they […]

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Origins of Human Cumulative Culture – UCL (2017)

February 27, 2017 at 10:43 am / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Captain James Cook was fascinated by Polynesians’ ability to converse with each other. In Tahiti a high priest named Tupaia got on board and accompanied him along their voyage to Hawaii. Despite the fact that the two islands were separated by more than 2500 miles Tupaia was able to converse perfectly with Hawaiians. In order to maintain a common language these seemingly isolated islands must have been connected by frequent trans-oceanic voyages. Genetical and ecological theory dictates that connectivity is […]

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At an Mbendjele Camp in Congo – Gül Deniz Salalı (2015)

February 26, 2017 at 8:48 am / Human Nature, Video

These footage were recorded in an Mbendjele BaYaka Pygmies camp of northern Congo-Brazzaville during a year long field study on Human behavior by a UCL researcher Gül Deniz Salalı. The Mbendjele camp filmed here is called Masia. The videos highlighted here are a part of a much larger project aiming to understand the origins of the human cumulative culture. The main video shows how a woman named Semoi (wearing red African fabric) harvests tubers of wild yam (Dioscorea) locally called […]

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A Tour of the Cryosphere – NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (2009)

February 19, 2017 at 10:26 pm / Global Patterns, Video

The cryosphere covers parts of the Earth’s surface where water is found in the form of snow, sea ice, glaciers, permafrost, ice sheets, and icebergs. Ice and snow exist close to their melting point. Fluctuations in surface temperatures of our planet leads to frequent state changes in water from solid to liquid and back. Using satellite observations scientists monitor such changes in the global and regional climate. The Earth’s cryosphere shrink and expand on a yearly basis. Antarctica The animation […]

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A Day in the Life of an Elite Male Greater Sage-Grouse on the Lek – Marc Dantzker – Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2015)

February 16, 2017 at 2:10 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Here’s another fascinating piece of natural history from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In this series of short observations staff producer and biologist Marc Dantzker breaks down the mating behavior and social interaction of the Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) in five sections. Lekking or lek mating is a breeding behavior where males come together in a place and perform competitive displays to impress visiting females. While males do their “hello check me out” dances, females asses their qualities and choose […]

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A Leafcutter Ant Colony in Barro Colorado Island

February 13, 2017 at 6:10 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

Filmed on Jan 28th 2017 during the dry season. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institue (STRI) Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama. Leafcutter ants are an impressive group with more than 40 different species. All evolved and diversified in the New World at around 12 million years ago. Phylogenetic evidence suggests their evolution could go back as far as 50 million years ago when America separated from Africa. A mature colony can have more than 8 million workers collectively farming a subterranean fungus. […]

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Ecology from the Air – Greg Asner (2009) TED Talk

January 30, 2017 at 1:44 am / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Video

Being able to measure interaction of the living and the non-living at large continental-scales is eye opening. That’s what successful scientist Greg Asner does with the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO). NASA’s Landsat earth observation satellites have been feeding us invaluable global-scale data for more than 40 years. The new satellite Landsat 8 began transmitting near-realtime information. Thanks to these earth observation satellites we can instantly know scale of natural or human-made impacts on ecosystems. Deforestation for oil palm plantations in […]

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The Navigators / Pathfinders of the Pacific – Sanford Low and Boyd Estus (1983)

January 25, 2017 at 9:05 am / Human Nature, Video

Navigation on the open ocean has been a grand challenge for Humanity. Vikings used Icelandic feldspar chrystals called sunstones enabling detection of the direction of the sun through polarizing light. Chinese used magnetic compass. Calculation of the longitude was an immense problem. Celestial objects have been used by almost all seafarers globally. Polinesians mastered the star compass technique and carried it to a new level in Human history. “The Navigators” was co-directed by Sam Low and Boyd Estus covering the […]

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Geological History of the Continents/Paleomap Project – Christopher Scotese (2015)

January 5, 2017 at 9:28 pm / Evolution, Global Patterns, Video

Geology and biological evolution of life are inseparable. More than half of the minerals now incorporated into the upper crust of our planet were produced by living organisms. The movement of continental plates has played a fundamental role in the recycling of mineral resources by the biosphere. Scientists now predict that tectonic activity may have been one of the prerequisites for the origin of life. The acceptance of continental drift by the scientific community and how it affected Earth’s history […]

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Western Ghats Program – CEPF/ATREE (2016)

December 25, 2016 at 9:28 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Video

India’s Western Ghats is an ecologically unique biodiversity hotspot recognized by the United Nations as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF) in association with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) have been supporting projects by conservationists and researchers in the area. The exceptionally high level of biological diversity and endemism in this mountain chain represents some of the best representatives of non-equatorial tropical evergreen forests in the world. Natural history and evolution […]

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Earthquakes and Tsunamis – PTWC/NOAA (2016)

December 9, 2016 at 12:11 pm / Global Patterns, Video

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) of NOAA has produced a set of educational videos to inform public about earthquakes and tsunamis. The playlist includes seismological analysis of many destructive earthquakes and dynamics of subsequent tsunamis from tectonically active regions of the world. The first animation in the playlist graphically compares the relative sizes of some notable earthquakes by their moment magnitudes. Each circle’s area represents its relative energy release. Color of the circles indicate their tsunami potential. Their labels […]

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