Journey to the Microcosmos

An April Fools Episode

Join us on the first episode of Journey to the Microcosmos as we take a dive into the tiny, unseen world that surrounds us! With music by Andrew Huang, footage from James Weiss, and narration by Hank Green, we hope to take you on a fascinating, reflective journey!

On this week's journey, we explore the ways things eat in the microcosmos, from Stentors filter feeding to Dileptus hunting down and absorbing its prey.

It's time to meet a single-celled organism that is bigger than a tardigrade! We'll learn how Stentors reproduce, why they look like trumpets, and why some of them are just SO BLUE!

In our Season 2 debut, we're diving back into the world of our favorite little water bear friends!

Original Title: Our Tardigrade Had Babies!

Differential interference contrast is not a microscope, but rather a method that enhances contrast, and thanks to our new microscope we are able to share some amazing DIC images with you!

Everybody poops, but how does one poop when one does not have a butthole?

As the search for alternative energy sources continues, scientists are looking to the microcosmos and wondering: Can we use algae oil to power our cars, our airplanes, and maybe even our spaceships?

It's time to dive into our collection of spores, molds, and fungus!

Every experiment has to start somewhere. This one began with a container full of dying microbes, and the five cute, pink ciliates called blepharisma that James, our master of microscopes, accidentally turned into a group of cannibals.

We’re starting this episode out with a question that we’re never going to have a good answer for: how many cells do animals have? How could we ever hope to count all those cells in each of those animals? And how could we even begin to assume that the amount of cells in one individual is going to be the same for all the other individuals?

Somewhere around 470 million years ago, something happened that shouldn’t have been particularly striking. An algae found its way onto land. This algae turned the lands of this earth green, altered the chemistry of our atmosphere, and created homes for future life. This algae would give rise to all of the land plants we know of today.

If we were to write a fable to get this moral across, it would have to star the freshwater cnidarian called the hydra. Because in the hydra, the question of butts connects to the ambiguities of immortality, which in turn relates to the befuddling matter of sexual reproduction.

Oomycetes are one of the more unusual-looking microbes we’ve seen in the microcosmos. It looks more like a coral reef painted by an artist inspired by Gustav Klimt and a pile of trash. And if you saw that painting hanging in the museum, you might pass it by without thinking much of its subject.

The microcosmos is home to many unusual partnerships. Life is, after all, just relationships, each of which build upon one another like strokes of paint in an epic tableau of ecology, epidemics, and yogurt?