I caught this on the news tonight, where one of the networks had a piece about it. It's an eight-minute video showing the inner workings of a cell. Fascinating stuff. Apparently it was made at the behest of Harvard biologists who wanted to make the subject more exciting for their students, and the video has apparently gone on to win major awards.

 

News story about it here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1713188/posts

 

The video is available here:

http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/

 

I recommend watching both the abbreviated 3-minute version, which has cool music, and the longer version which has a voice-over narration track.

Excellent visuals. I doubt most people realize how complex a cell really is. Kinda blows away the "jello mold" concept of the cell.

 

Too bad the naration is designed only for biology students. Pratically incomprehensible to us regular people. I think the visual simplicity deserves a middleschool-level audio track as well. that's where they'll find a larger audience of potencial biologists, instead of trying to re-invigorate the ones they've got.

 

Anyway, a great video and worth the attempt to understand the audio. Thanks for the link!!

Yah my eyes glazed over pretty quick, and I think you're right, it would be a nice tool for layman educational purposes. I think this experiment has surprised them in terms of its popularity, so perhaps something will be done about that.

 

One thing I wondered about is whether those are blood cells specifically, or some other type of cell, or if they're intended to be more generic than that. And if the latter is the case, how these cells differ from cells found in other organisms (in the broad sense).

some discussion of that same XVIVO Harvard cell video we had earlier

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23029

 

this was in September, IIRC we didn't see the longer version at that time, only the 3 minute version with music.

 

beautiful