Recent Videos

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  Understanding Our Moon – NASA/SVS

  May 17, 2016 at 2:02 pm / Video

  The Moon has been a very influential body on life on Earth. Some argue that having a satellite like the Moon is a prerequisite for life in other planets. The Moon has a stabilizing effect on rotation axis of our planet. Without it, the axis would wobble more erratically making ice ages and inter-glacial warming periods more extreme and sudden. Understanding our Moon will help understand evolutionary history of our planet. After all, both bodies have started forming from the […]

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  City Farms – KQED/QUEST (2013)

  May 16, 2016 at 11:42 am / Human Nature, Video

  On the forefront of Good Food Revolution Will Allen of Milwaukee demonstrates a working Urban Farm. He defines his effort as establishing oasis in a “food desert”. The program prepared by QUEST gives a brief biographical sketch and highlights from the project. Following a significant career in basketball, Allen decided to go back to farming. In 2008 he was granted a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his influential contributions to the urban agricultural practices. “The Great Migration transformed the […]

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  Decoding the Chemical Language of Nature – Jing-Ke Weng | TEDxBeaconStreet (2015)

  May 6, 2016 at 9:17 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history

  Chemical diversity in nature is bewildering. Repertoire of chemicals in plants is especially rich. A great majority (almost all) of the single-compound drugs have been discovered in plants: salicylic acid (Aspirin), artemisinin (anti-malarial), thebaine (analgesic derived from opium) are just a quick few to spell out. All these chemicals are products of specialized secondary metabolic pathways in plants. Chemical compounds forming specialized metabolites protect plants against various abiotic stresses and mediate an array of interspecies interactions, ranging from seduction of […]

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  Kars Ardahan Documentary – Alkım Ün (2007)

  May 4, 2016 at 5:50 pm / Human Nature, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

  Director of the KarsArdahan documentary is an emerging Turkish documentarist Alkım Ün. In 2009 he received an award in Boston Turkish Film Festival with this production. Alkım Ün has a degree in biology education and has a particular talent in “reading the landscape” with the eyes of a biologist. Just before the project he had made lengthy observations on wildlife of the region. Kars – Ardahan Plateau is a biologically and geologically distinct region of Turkey. It sits between two […]

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  Conserving Colombia’s Cotton-Top Tamarin – Federico Pardo (2011)

  April 21, 2016 at 11:20 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

  About the size of a squirrel, the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) is a New World primate. It has a characteristic shock of white hair on it’s head. Males and females do not vary in size (not sexually dimorphic). The cotton-top tamarin was declared endangered in 1973 following the exportation of 20,000-40,000 tamarins to the United States for use in biomedical research. Cotton-top tamarins were found to spontaneously develop colorectal cancer and for this reason served as an ideal model for […]

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  The World’s Fastest Runner – Greg Wilson – National Geographic (2012)

  April 14, 2016 at 10:42 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

  A well-designed filming set up to capture the motions of running Cheetahs. Since late MIT professor Doc Edgarton’s time highspeed cameras have evolved wonderfully enabling technical capabilities for producing great slow motion films. In this production the filming crew used a Phantom Flex highspeed recording camera. The following talk by the director Greg Wilson gives us the behind-the-scenes view of the project. The entire set up was constructed on the running alley specially designed for exercising the Cheetahs of Cincinnati […]

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  Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur – BBC (2016)

  April 10, 2016 at 10:56 am / BBC documentaries, Evolution, Natural history

  On February 19th 2016, a replica of the massive Titanosaurus dinosaur (Patagotitan mayorum) discovered in Argentinian Patagonia was unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is continuing to send strong waves of excitement to all natural history enthusiasts worldwide. Based on accurate dating of the volcanic ash surrounding the fossil we now know that the animal lived 100.6 million years ago during the Cretaceous. It belongs to the Sauropod group and yet is the largest […]

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  Giant Ichneumon Wasp (Megarhyssa macrurus) Ovipositing

  April 3, 2016 at 1:49 pm / Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

  Giant Ichneumon wasp (Megaryssa macrurus, Linneaus 1771) ovipositing. 10th of August 2013, Georgia State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA. 3:47 pm. This observation has been registered in iNaturalist.org with ID# 418639. Oviposition marks the beginning of the life cycle of all insects including parasitoid wasps. Females of Megarryhssa macrurus (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) are specialized to lay their eggs in the burrows of wood eating Pigeon Tremex Horntail (Tremex columba) larvae between June and September. Only one egg is deposited per host larva […]

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  What’s Really Warming Up Our Planet? NASA – SVS (2015)

  April 1, 2016 at 2:09 pm / Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

  NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) produced yet another visual to show how industrial and natural factors have been contributing to the global warming. These factors are wobbling of Earth’s axis, solar activity, volcanoes, land use, ozone pollution, aerosol pollution, greenhouse gases and their combined effects. The case is rather clear. Combined effects of man made factors follow the trajectory of warming closely. Since 1880 our planet warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit and continues to increase. The atmospheric carbon concentration has passed […]

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  The Day The Mesozoic Died HHMI – Sean B. Carroll (2012)

  March 30, 2016 at 3:09 pm / Evolution, Global Patterns, Video

  This is one of the four educational video series by Sean B. Carroll produced for communicating evolution to public with the support of HHMI. Today we know the cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. This knowledge was produced by the meticulous coordinated work of many scientists. The Day The Mesozoic Died focuses on how scientists do the detective work using the scientific method. The discovery that an asteroid struck the Earth 66 […]

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  How Does the Purple Bacteria Photosynthesize? Beckman Institute-UIUC (2015)

  March 28, 2016 at 11:03 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

  Imagine a time when our young Earth was spinning much faster and days were only 8 hours! Our sun was much cooler and less bright than today. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Those were the conditions when first photosynthetic organisms with purple pigments evolved in liquid environments. In this animation we see one such ancestral form of early anoxic photosynthesis taking place in the purple bacteria Rhodobacter sphaeroides in which oxygen is not produced. Life evolved into oxygen […]

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  The Science of Camera Sensors – FimmakerIQ (2015)

  March 24, 2016 at 11:17 pm / Technical Notes, Video

  Camera technology has come a long way since the legendary Akeley gyroscope camera that made filming of truly historic documentary films such as Nanook of the North (1922) and Grass (1922). Now everything digital, an overview of the modern camera sensors is useful for naturalists. This lecture by FilmmakerIQ is a part of the Technical Notes series by Nature Documentaries aiming to compile useful technical, theoretical and practical knowledge for documentary filmmakers. The episode illustrates the electronic working principles of […]

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  The History and Science of Lenses – FilmmakerIQ (2015)

  March 24, 2016 at 11:16 pm / Technical Notes, Video

  Glass has been a truly transformational material in Human history. Among many other remarkable things glass helped us understand and control properties of light. From photocopying machines to fiber optic cables glass revolutionized our lives. Gutenberg’s printing machine was a turning point with an unintended consequence. Printing created a huge demand for spectacles and glasswork craftsmanship in Europe literally exploded. Craftsmanship that built spectacles lead to building of more specialized optical instruments including microscopes, telescopes and eventually cameras. For all […]

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  Depth of Field and Lens Equivalents – FilmmakerIQ (2016)

  March 24, 2016 at 11:14 pm / Technical Notes, Video

  How does one achieve a sharp and clear image? What is depth of field? What is depth of focus? What affects their shallowness? This episode from FilmmakerIQ nicely explains the theory behind using the physics of light. Before starting the lecture you should have some basic understanding of the camera lenses such as the aperture. This is a part of the Technical Notes series of Nature Documentaries aiming to compile useful technical, theoretical and practical knowledge for documentary filmmakers. The […]

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  The History of Frame Rate for Film – FilmmakerIQ (2015)

  March 24, 2016 at 11:11 pm / Technical Notes, Video

  This is a great breakdown of seemingly arbitrary and highly variable frame rates we experience today. Until the incorporation of sound which arrived as a superbly egalitarian/standardizing factor into the film, the frame rates were rather floppy. This lecture by FilmmakerIQ is a part of the Technical Notes series by Nature Documentaries aiming to compile useful technical, theoretical and practical knowledge for documentary filmmakers. The compact episode introduces the historical transitions from hand-cranked cinematographic cameras into television and later to […]

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