In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California - Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.

We love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.

PS. Need a DNA primer? Watch this vid.

From KQEDscience

Bottle by Kirsten Lepore, a 2010 stop-motion animated story about a transoceanic, message-in-a-bottle conversation and the emotions that come with it.

We’ve featured Lepore’s work previously. You can also watch how she made Bottle in this behind the scenes vid.

Filmmaker Maarten Koopman’s animated series of famous paintings, imagined piece by piece from some new perspectives.

Shown: Pieter Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, Vincent van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles, Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Claude Monet’s Nympheas, Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, and Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Thanks, @chrishiggins.

How Mendel’s pea plants helped us understand genetics. Also explained in a single vintage illustration. Complement with why we are all related.

From TED-Ed.

via explore-blog.

A series of clumsy penguin outtakes from the BBC’s Penguins - Spy in the Huddle, narrated by David Tennant. (Updated video link.) The documentary team disguised 50 cameras — as penguins, rocks, snowballs, etc — to capture three species: Emperor Penguins, Rockhoppers and Humboldts. Here’s a clip of one of the hidden penguin cams among Emperors:

And here are two more Emperor penguin clips: how an egg is laid in cold and a baby penguin’s first steps. 

via Neatorama.