Pretend You're a Leaf
Living Beings
•
31m
Swirling green energy factories capture the energy of sunlight, thus enabling life on earth. Cytoplasmic streaming inside plant cells is very efficient -- the slow turning of each round chloroplast means every square micron gets a chance to create energy and oxygen from sunlight. Here, we're able to see through the exceedingly thin leaf of a popular aquatic plant, Elodea, and observe microscopic cellular activities. Photosynthesis is similar in other primary producers like cyanobacteria and algae. Thanks to UCLA for the use of their beautiful microscope and motorized stage. Music by KRON.
Up Next in Living Beings
-
Endosymbiosis
Encounter hundreds of species of microbe that exist nowhere else on the planet outside of a termite's gut. These microbes enable their termite host to digest the wood it infamously devours. The termite and these microbes share what is called an obligate endosymbiotic relationship. That is, neithe...
-
Founding an Ant Colony | Narrated
Only a few will be Queen. Discover what it takes to start a new ant colony in this rare visit inside a founding queen's underground brood chamber.
-
Feathers | narrated
Ornithologist Richard Prum shares his knowledge of the natural math of feather patterning. Simple feather patterns can be predicted using mathematical models called Turing reaction-diffusion equations. As a feather grows, each new cell must decide whether it will receive pigment or not, depending...