Science

How the world’s richest reds are derived from an innocuous Mexican insect

5 minutes

Building embryos

For 3,000 years, humans have struggled to understand the embryo. Now there is a revolution underway

John Wallingford

Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?

12 minutes

The cell is not a factory

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

Charudatta Navare

Artists of our own lives

The genome is the starting point for a performance we enact over a lifetime, not a blueprint we’ve got to follow

Richard O Prum

Explore a bioluminescent world of cellular life via cutting-edge microscopy

27 minutes

In 1886, a US agency set out to record new fruit varieties. The results are wondrous

5 minutes

To understand how an animal sees the world, start with the shape of its pupils

5 minutes

The grassroots project that’s restoring an endangered Hawaiian ecosystem

22 minutes

The key to geckos’ unrivalled climbing skills isn’t sticky feet. It’s subatomic

4 minutes

In the search for life, might alien ocean worlds be a better bet than Earth-like planets?

5 minutes

A dazzling slice-by-slice exploration of wood exposes hidden patterns and hues

2 minutes

Octopus time

We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time?

David Borkenhagen

The idea that life on Earth originated elsewhere is not as far out as it seems

6 minutes

Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves

3 minutes

What it’s like to wear a prosthetic that ‘feels’

6 minutes

To understand the limits of human senses, look to the wild world of animal cognition

45 minutes

Symmetry rules life on Earth – but it comes with many fascinating exceptions

9 minutes

There’s no one way for an insect to fly, but they’re all amazing in close up and slo-mo

7 minutes

Fortune favours the shrewd

Attaining and maintaining power lies at the heart of almost all animal societies. And it’s as devious as human politicking

Lee Alan Dugatkin

Dazzling timelapse shows how microbes spoil our food – and sometimes enrich it

22 minutes