Watch a two-year time-lapse of a pinecone seed transforming into a pine tree.

A timelapse of sprouting seeds

Germination is the process where an organism sprouts from a seed or spore. This timelapse captures the process in an inspiring, two-minute video so you can see the whole story of the seed quickly.

From seed to pumpkin, a 3-minute time-lapse

Pumpkins are atypically enormous winter squashes, meaning they are harvested in the fall and then remain edible throughout winter. See how it all happens with this mesmerizing, music-backed time-lapse showcasing a pumpkin's 120-day journey from...

Watch a time-lapse from space of photosynthesis across Earth

Using NASA satellite imagery, carbon absorption can be tracked and serves as a proxy for photosynthetic activity on land and in the oceans. Over the course of a year, seasonal changes can be observed as plants become dormant in the fall and active again in the spring.

Watch an animation of Arctic sea ice grow to its maximum

Each year, Arctic sea ice freezes over millions of square miles amid colder temperatures. This 1-minute animation depicts that process using data from the winter of 2022-23.

Watch a salamander grow from fertilization to hatching

New microscopy techniques have allowed scientists to image the development of animal embryos with unprecedented detail. This six-minute time-lapse reveals the development of a salamander from initial fertilization to hatching from an egg.

The weather time machine

A fun interactive on how old ships’ logs are giving scientists new insights into the past and future of the Earth’s changing climate (w/maps and pictures).

Tree rings can reveal centuries of environmental change and natural events

The width and shape of tree rings reflect yearly growth conditions like rainfall or snowfall. Scars in the rings can record disruptions such as fires, avalanches, or earthquakes, explaining when and how those events occurred.

Watch 1 billion years of tectonic plate movement in 40 seconds

Researchers at the University of Sydney developed the model, incorporating changing plate boundaries rather than just moving continents, to better understand the changes to biological and climatic systems throughout Earth’s history.

Explore a map of changing tree cover gains and losses around the world since 2000.

Watch insects and animal pollinators in slow motion

Louie Schwartzberg's "Moving Art" series showcases slow-motion footage of oceans, forests, deserts, flowers, and more. In this excerpt, organisms such as bats, monarch butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds are shown interacting with one another and with flowering plants.

Watch an AI-generated short film

The Waymark production company created "The Frost" using the AI platform DALL-E 2. Set in an apocalyptic future where the weather has been stalled, the film was made by stitching together hundreds of clips, each only a few seconds long.

Wind helps trees develop resistance to collapse

Scientists at Biosphere 2 found that trees grew faster in the facility than those in the wild but collapsed more quickly when replanted outdoors. Researchers uncovered that trees build resistance when pushed and pulled due to wind stress, strengthening their foundational root systems.

Why we have different seasons

Visualize just how exactly seasons come to be with this animation of the earth in relation to the sun, and see how earth's tilt determines our seasons.

Biosphere 2 revealed limitations in maintaining wildlife in unfamiliar environments

Trees appeared to become weak and more prone to breaking because a lack of wind caused them to no longer need to develop stress wood. The extinction of pollinators—potentially due to an explosion in the population of longhorn crazy ants—was also unexpected.

Visualize a model of all of time, where our lives span less than the width of a human hair

The massive model was built across a Mojave Desert lake bed using 800 lights spaced just 10 meters apart. Within the model, the entirety of human civilization appears only in the final centimeter.

Listen to audio recordings of forests from around the world, featuring birds chirping, water flowing, and wind flowing through the trees.

NASA satellite data and sound recordings used to assess rainforest health

This two-minute video describes the work of scientists who are analyzing the impact of repeated forest fires in the Amazon by recording the unique sounds in degraded forests. The team is using acoustic sensors to record sounds of wildlife in the...

Explore the effects of tornadoes of different scales

In this simulation, users can adjust the tornado's diameter and rotation speed to see its impact as it passes through a series of trees and a one-story home.

Watch a tour of a 3D visualization of the Pillars of Creation

Combining observational data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes has allowed NASA scientists to create a multiwavelength model of the star-forming region at the heart of the Eagle nebula.

Watch a 4K time-lapse of auroras seen from the International Space Station

The video was created from 711 photos taken by European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli on Sept. 15, 2017, as part of the Vitality, Innovation, Technology, and Ability mission.

Watch how dozens of everyday human tasks are performed in space

This playlist features clips of astronauts aboard the International Space Station explaining how they cook, eat, sleep, and conduct research in microgravity. Other activities to pass the time, including watering plants and playing soccer, are also shown.

Take a series of virtual tours of Biosphere 2

The videos provide a 360-degree view of the indoor rainforest, ocean ecosystem, Landscape Evolution Observatory, and underground technosphere. A Google Maps Street View option is available to explore additional biomes, with each associated with a different floor level on the bottom right.

Travel through deep time with this interactive Earth

Explore key moments in Earth’s transformative history as continents drift and climate fluctuates over 4.6 billion years. The Smithsonian presents a series of interactive snapshots of the earth. From its toddler years during the Hadean period, when its surface was mostly molten, to the mostly unidentifiable landmasses of the future earth, 100 million years from now.

Watch a digital archive of David Attenborough's 'Planet Earth' miniseries

Created over five years, the production was the first documentary series to be filmed in high definition and, when released in 2006, the BBC's most expensive nature documentary series. The Emmy Award-winning series featured 11 episodes, each focused on a different Earth biome.

Grasp the earth's orbit around the sun with this interactive

See why seasons exist with this interactive simulator. Toggle between different views of the earth in relation to the sun and watch as the earth's axis causes the sun to shine at different angles throughout the year, causing the weather to fluctuate and more. This simulator clarifies a process many take for granted.

Watch the Arecibo Observatory collapse

Watch this remarkable footage of the Arecibo Observatory's 900-ton platform falling into the 1,000-foot wide (305 meters) dish below, followed by footage from a drone coincidentally observing the cables at the time they snapped.

How women grow tiny humans inside of them

Pregnancy is a complex biological journey, lasting about 40 weeks. When a sperm fertilizes an egg, that event triggers intricate cellular and hormonal processes, driven by hardwired cellular instructions, which lead to cell division, differentiation, and development—ultimately culminating in the birth of a baby.

Watch 'Airhead,' a short movie created by Sora and post-production FX

Using OpenAI’s video-generation tool Sora, a user can create impressive, hyper-realistic video footage from a simple text prompt. This short film features a whimsical look at a balloon-headed person navigating the world.

The world, one year after humanity goes extinct

The Earth is so shaped by human action, it's hard to imagine what it would look like without us. This brief, digestible explainer for kids highlights what a humanless world would look like one year after the extinction event.

Follow an IVF procedure from lab to transplant

What happens once eggs are harvested from an ovary? How does an embryo form within a petri dish? This detailed video offers a glimpse of the transformations eggs experience as women age, and how sperm are injected into eggs in some forms of IVF treatment.

Watch an amateur fly a 1902 Wright glider at the Kitty Hawk dunes

Billy Vaughan recreates the test flights of the Wright gliders in the exact location the brothers conducted them. He argues an October 1902 glider flight—not the December 1903 one—was the key innovative moment, implementing three-axis control. Host Baratunde rides a glider in perfect windy conditions in this re-creation.

Watch a simulation of a collapsing star becoming a black hole

When a massive star can no longer release enough energy through fusion in its core to fight off gravitational collapse, the dense core collapses first, producing an event horizon that traps light within it, including some light produced within the star at the time of collapse. As more material falls into the growing event horizon, the star will appear to eclipse itself from the inside.

Journey through Norway's frozen frontier

This 44-minute video takes viewers through the Arctic landscapes of Norway, as they learn about the area's life and challenges. Viewers can observe the wildlife that thrives in this harsh setting—from reindeer and polar bears to red foxes. They...

Visualizing the history of Saturn and its rings

Every 13 to 16 years, Saturn's rings become far less visible because its plane becomes exactly even with Earth's. This visual-rich essay explores the history of humanity's perception of Saturn, from Galileo's first sighting (and dubbing the rings "ears") to the idea that the rings won't last more than a few hundred millions years more. Explore this fascinating planet here.

British royal history from a literal bird's-eye view

Learn the history of British monarchs going back centuries with this unusual, 50-minute documentary filmed entirely from the air, revealing key landmarks in beautiful footage alongside engaging commentary.

Stephen Wilkes' day-to-night panoramas

Renowned US photographer Stephen Wilkes creates distilled time-lapses of cityscapes and landscapes using a novel form: He takes roughly 1,500 images over 30 hours of the same shot, later layering them together to reveal the scene's shift from day to...

Watch visualization of different-sized asteroid impacts

The animations range from a 4-meter-wide asteroid that would burn up in the atmosphere with the impact of 0.6 Hiroshima nuclear bombs to a 940-kilometer asteroid the size of the dwarf planet Ceres, which would produce a mass extinction event.

Watch every episode of David Attenborough's 'Life on Earth' series

A three-year global expedition by Attenborough and his team produced the television series, which debuted in the UK in 1979 and documented over 600 species in 40 countries. The series is estimated to have been seen by over 500 million people in more than 100 territories, including within the US, where is debuted on PBS in 1982.

A list of some of the best episodes from David Attenborough's works and where to watch them

From the first steps of the long-eared jerboa—an animal not captured on film before "Life Story"—and bears catching salmon on their upstream pilgrimages to the bioluminescent sea creatures in the trenches of the ocean and Weddell seals giving birth, learn where to see some of the most remarkable moments in Attenborough's catalog.

Learn how the Earth was made

Four and a half billion years ago the Earth formed from dust in space to become a molten ball of rock orbiting the sun. Travel back in time to investigate how the Earth was made.

Watch a time-lapse of the construction of a data center

After the external structure of a data center is built, cooling systems are installed, followed by interior offices and other rooms. Before installing racks of servers and other equipment, floors are raised beneath where they will be installed to create space for cold fluid to be pumped into the hardware and to facilitate cable management.

Explore an interactive timeline of technological inventions and social structures since 1500.

A fascinating look at how our DNA is built and replicated

This easy-to-understand 13-minute video dives into the wondrous molecule deoxyribonucleic acid – also known as DNA – and explains how it replicates itself in our cells.

A 3D animation brings Pompeii's final day to life

This animation recreates the city from a rooftop vantage point, showing how an ordinary day turned deadly as Vesuvius erupted. The most chilling moment comes when a 900-degree cloud of toxic gas engulfs Pompeii in seconds.

Watch a documentary on what the first 10,000 days of colonizing the moon look like

Alongside the construction of the first lunar base with help from SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System, transported astronauts would establish a sustainable human presence through the construction of lunar dust shields, light-bending towers, and 3D-printed habitats.

Watch a simulated flight through Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Since its discovery over 350 years ago, the anticyclonic storm—with a high-pressure center and flows opposite to the low-pressure system underneath it—has fascinated astronomers due to its size, which is larger than Earth's, and its prominent features, including winds that surpass 250 miles per hour.

Experimenting with space-time

Einstein's theory of general relativity—that mass literally bends space and time—can be difficult for the human brain to imagine. This interactive resource lets you create celestial objects, imagine their effect on space-time, and see how they interact with each other (best viewed on desktop).

Imagining the farms of the future

About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history and enabled the existence of civilization. Today, nearly 40 percent of our planet is farmland. Spread all over the world, these lands are the pieces to a global puzzle we're all facing: in the future, how can we feed every member of a growing population a healthy diet? Brent Loken investigates in this seven-minute video.

Watch a visualization of how Earth's oceans impact its atmosphere, weather, and climate.

An interactive look at Earth's history

This interactive module allows students to explore the science of Earth’s deep history, from its formation 4.5 billion years ago to modern times.