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Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin – PBS (2014)

September 24, 2024 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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Australian Walking Stick Insects are Three Times Weirder Than You Think | PBS – Deep Look (2022)

February 11, 2022 at 3:20 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, PBS Nature, Short Observations

It is a seed, no it is an ant, no it is a leaf, no it is a stick,… Actually, it is all of the above through a temporally spaced sequence of disguises (*): It is the Australian walking stick (Extatosoma tiaratum). This insect is indeed a master of deception. It is a fascinating example of a series of adaptations that maximized its survival by multiple versions of mimicry successfully fooling predators at every stage of their life cycle. (*) […]

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Visiting the most vulnerable place on Earth: the ‘doomsday glacier’ – PBS Newshour (2020)

October 5, 2020 at 4:45 pm / Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature

For a little over more than 33 million years, the Antarctic continent remained an exceptionally isolated land mass due to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that forms a thermal shield around it. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on our planet flowing without obstruction from any other land masses. Unfortunately human induced global warming is changing all that and the effects of the climate change is being felt at both poles of the planet through a phenomenon known […]

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Decoding COVID-19 – Sara Holt | NOVA / PBS (2020)

August 17, 2020 at 8:46 pm / Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Center for Disease Control (CDC) has been one of the most effective institutions in fight against emerging diseases. Yet, strikingly, the US has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Elimination of the immensely important the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — established in 2015 is now deemed one of the biggest political mistakes of our time. Unfortunately political interference continued to render experts of this most cutting edge organization largely ineffective and left […]

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NOAA Hurricane Hunters – PBS NewsHour (2018)

July 31, 2020 at 10:11 pm / Global Patterns, PBS Nature, Video

Every hurricane season a fleet of “Hurricane Hunter” planes are deployed to “airtruth” the atmospheric conditions of storms long before they make a landfall. A pair of Lockheed P3 Orion turboprop planes nicknamed “Kermit and “Miss Piggy” are among them. Hurricane Hunter missions are crucial to verify and fine-tune satellite measurements. Hurricane Hunters fly directly into the hurricanes and traverse the eye of the storm several times in order to collect atmospheric data equipped with airborne Doppler weather radar. During […]

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How The Coronavirus Attacks Your Lungs | KQED / Deep Look (2020)

May 7, 2020 at 8:58 am / Human Nature, Molecular Nature, PBS Nature

DEEP LOOK is a ultra-HD (4K) short video series created by KQED San Francisco and presented by PBS Digital Studios. In this special episode they are doing a vital job by disseminating reliable information on SARS-CoV-2 virus which leads to COVID-19 respiratory disease. The BBC Documentary The Hidden Life of the Cell has done a wonderful job of providing a visual story telling by animating series of events leading to an Adenovirus infection. You can also see how different coronaviruses […]

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The Queen of Trees – PBS (2006)

September 27, 2019 at 10:22 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Queen of Trees is now viewable on the official YouTube Channel of Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble. Veteran wildlife filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble once again put out a marvelous work by compiling observations on a community centered around a sycamore fig tree. The success of the documentary comes from their long-term observations in a particular filming spot in Kenya where they camped on location for more than two years. A thorough understanding of the landscape with it’s inhabitants […]

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Whack! Jab! Crack! It’s a Blackback Land Crab Smackdown – Deep Look – PBS/KQED (2019)

August 23, 2019 at 9:50 pm / Natural history, PBS Nature, Short Observations, Video

DEEP LOOK is an award-winning PBS program produced by KQED. Here’s another cool story from season 5 Episode 13. Shred a sponge into thousands of pieces but the cells can still rearrange and organize themselves in a surprisingly rapid manner. Here we are shown a snapshot of another example of limb regeneration from the crustacean blackback land crab (Gecarcinus ruricola) native to the Caribbean. Human tissue and organ regeneration is a curious goal for medicine. However in order to achieve […]

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Let Them Eat Flies! KQED/QUEST (2014)

November 3, 2018 at 10:15 am / Ecological Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Insects are a hugely successful group of organisms. Their evolution transformed life on land immensely especially influencing flowering plant evolution. Insects also play a large role as food sources. Here in this KQED documentary we see how a fly farm in Ohio rears a common insect, the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) to be used as food for fish farms. Some City farms have successfully been growing fish beneath the plants which helps recycling of nutrients reducing fertilizer use. Aquaponics […]

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What Gall! The Crazy Cribs of Parasitic Wasps – Deep Look – PBS/KQED (2015)

November 2, 2018 at 11:45 am / Evolution, Natural history, PBS Nature, Video

Another fascinating episode from a series produced by PBS/KQED: Deep Look… Gall formations are indeed one of the most interesting examples of plant-animal interactions. Gall-inducing wasps are plant parasites. The larvae hijack the chemical signaling pathways by secreting two plant hormones auxin and cytokinin which induce abnormal cell divisions leading to gall formation. In certain instances anthocyanin production pathways become upregulated and this gives most of the gall tissues their characteristic red color. Larvae also induce sugary secretions and literally […]

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Run Hide be Invisible – Revealing the Leopard – PBS/NATURE (2010)

October 22, 2017 at 12:16 am / Natural history, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

The Leopard (Felis pardus Linnaeus, 1758) is one of the most successful big cats of our time. It’s ability to adapt to different climates and habitats enabled spreading out of Africa into Asia. They live in diverse habitats such as forests, subtropical and tropical savannas, grasslands, rocky and mountainous regions, and even deserts. The leopard can live in both warm and cold climates. It has a very broad food base ranging from insects to large mammals. In Africa this cat […]

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Leave It to Beavers – PBS (2014)

May 22, 2017 at 1:14 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

There are two species of beavers in the temperate zones of the world. North American (Castor canadensis) and Eurasian (Castor fiber) beavers were almost exterminated to extinction. These rodents are the largest after the tropical capybara that lives in wetlands of the South American tropics. Now bouncing back from extinction beaver populations are recovering under protection. Beavers are being recognized as keystone species by ecologists and conservation biologists. As habitat constructors and brilliant hydro-engineers, beavers can recharge water tables and […]

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Learning to Live on the Moon – PBS

May 17, 2016 at 2:04 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Energy flows, nutrients cycle. This is how we can define working principles of an ecosystem in a nutshell. Our planet has a very complex land-air-water interaction and we are only beginning to understand the behavior of these systems by simplifying them in enclosed systems such as Landscape Evolution Laboratory (LEO). Due to its proximity, the Moon appears to be the most convenient celestial body to colonize. The Moon is so close that it can even occasionally get shielded by the […]

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Coelacanth: The Fish That Time Forgot – PBS NOVA (2001)

December 12, 2015 at 7:00 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Coelacanth morphology and genome has been extremely informative in understanding tetrapod evolution. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of a natural history museum in East London. In 1938 a local fisher brought a curious fish specimen which was to become a major discovery in evolutionary biology. Latimer described the fish as Latimeria chalumnae. The fish was over 1 m long, bluish in color. Most interestingly it had fleshy fins that resembled the limbs of terrestrial vertebrates. The discovery was a hugely interesting […]

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Chasing El Niño – Carol L. Fleisher – PBS NOVA (1998)

August 13, 2015 at 9:42 am / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Can we predict El Niño? Moreover can we calculate it’s severity and effects on different parts of the world? On board the research ship Ka’imimoana scientists carry out measurements and then build computer models to understand the climate cycle that produces El Niño. The documentary “Chasing El Niño” was released by the aftermath of an intense El Niño event observed during 1997/1998 measured. In March 2015 climatologists have started to detect early signs of another one beginning to develop. They […]

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