The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created for Harvard biology students… illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.
The online video is beautiful, see - Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell. Update: Unfortunately the webcast links on that page are not working but you can see a longer version than was available via: Inner Life of a Cell - Full Version.
“What we did in some cases, with the full support of the Harvard team, was subtly change the way things work,” Liebler says. “The reality is that all that stuff that’s going on in each cell is so tightly packed together that if we were to put every detail into every shot, you wouldn’t be able to see the forest for the trees or know what you were even looking at. One of the most common things we did, then, was to strip it apart and add space where there isn’t really that much space.”
The video includes a nice musical soundtrack. It would be great to have alternative soundtracks explaining the science behind the animation.
Dr. Lue says the animation has received a “tremendously enthusiastic response from students in both freshman biology and sophomore cell biology courses. Furthermore, preliminary evaluation shows that using animations as a part of their study resource enhances performance on questions requiring data interpretation followed by hypothesis building in the cellular context by almost 30 percent.”
September 30th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
The number of great resources has prompted me to created a directory of great science and engineering webcast libraries: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Webcast Libraries. These sites have awesome science and engineering videos…
October 17th, 2006 at 8:52 am
[...] Example of what that will look like: The Inner Life of a Cell - Animation - ok actually that level of detail may still be fairly far away [...]
January 30th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
http://biosingularity.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/incredible-cartoon-video-of-the-inner-life-on-a-cell/
The above is a narration and is 8 minutes long. Five minutes longer than this version.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:57 pm
This is an extremely cool 8 minute movie on the inner workings of a Cell… They have added the scientific explanation that I mentioned I would love to see in the last post…