Watch videos about ‘nature’
The Private Life of Plants – Growing
This programme is about how plants gain their sustenance. Sunlight is one of the essential requirements if a seed is to germinate, and Attenborough highlights the cheese plant as an example whose young shoots head for the nearest tree trunk and then climb to the top of the forest canopy, developing its leaves en route. Using sunshine, air, water and a few minerals, the leaves are, in effect, the “factories” that produce food. However, some, such as the begonia, can thrive without much light.
To gain moisture, plants typically use their roots to probe underground. Trees pump water up pipes that run inside their trunks, and Attenborough observes that a sycamore can do this at the rate of 450 litres an hour — in total silence. Too much rainfall can clog up a leaf’s pores, and many have specially designed ‘gutters’ to cope with it. However, their biggest threat is from animals, and some require extreme methods of defence, such as spines, camouflage, or poison.
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The Private Life of Plants – Travelling
The first episode looks at how plants are able to move. The bramble is an aggressive example: it advances forcefully from side to side and, once settled on its course, there is little that can stand in its way. An altogether faster species is the birdcage plant, which inhabits Californian sand dunes. When its location becomes exposed, it shifts at great speed to another one with the assistance of wind — and it is this that allows many forms of vegetation to distribute their seeds. While not strictly a plant, the spores of fungi are also spread in a similar fashion. One of the most successful (and intricate) flowers to use the wind is the dandelion, whose seeds travel with the aid of ‘parachutes’. They are needed to travel miles away from their parents, who are too densely packed to allow any new arrivals. Trees have the advantage of height to send their seeds further, and the cottonwood is shown as a specialist in this regard. The humidity of the tropical rainforest creates transportation problems, and the liana is one plant whose seeds are aerodynamic ‘gliders’. Some, such as those of the sycamore, take the form of ‘helicopters’, while others, such as the squirting cucumber release their seeds by ‘exploding’. Water is also a widely used method of propulsion. However, most plants use living couriers, whether they be dogs, humans and other primates, ants or birds, etc., and to that end, they use colour and smell to signify when they are ripe for picking.
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Shifting Sands
The Mojave- a landscape of extreme and fragile beauty- will encounter new challenges with the coming climate change. Desert field researchers tell the story in their words and share their experiences with us. Joshua trees, Bighorn sheep, pupfish, desert springs, and even the soil crust itself face new problems.
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Earth 2100
Experts say over the next hundred years the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results.
In order to plan for the worst, we must anticipate it. In that spirit, guided by some of the world’s experts, ABC News’ “Earth 2100,” hosted by Bob Woodruff, will journey through the next century and explore what might be our worst-case scenario.
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The End of the Line
The world’s first major documentary about the devastating effect of overfishing premiered at Sundance Film Festival
Imagine an ocean without fish. Imagine your meals without seafood. Imagine the global consequences. This is the future if we do not stop, think and act.
Act of God
‘Act of God’ is a film about lightning. There are stories, some miraculous, others tragic, of people who have been struck by it; various people interested in it, or more generally, in the effects of electricity on the human brain, tell us why; and there is also some footage of storms. But there’s no science, and no structure either; and the choice of material never seems other than random, the selection is too broad to make the film seem personal, but too sketchy to make the film definitive. The director is clearly in awe of in his subject, but ultimately doesn’t appear to have very much to tell us about it, although getting hit by a bolt is clearly a bad idea. In truth, as a viewer, I was bored.
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Powers Of Ten
View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.
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Yellowstone National Park
America’s Most Incredible National Parks: Yellowstone
Yellowstone National Park became the first national park in the U.S. when it was established in 1872. Many Americans consider it the quintessential American national park; its highlights include Old Faithful geyser, hot springs, the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, and wildlife such as grizzlies, wolves, elk and bison. The park, spanning across parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, boasts about 10,000 hydrothermal features — half of the ones that exist in the world — among them 300 geysers.
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