Diatoms: Tiny Factories You Can See From Space
Journey to the Microcosmos2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2020–2024
explainer · general · evergreen · 2020–2024 on HN
An episode of Journey to the Microcosmos, hosted by Hank Green, about diatoms, single-celled algae with glass shells. It covers their role in producing a large share of Earth's oxygen and their uses in beer filtering, paint and kitty litter.
HN commenters recommend the series as an excellent, accessible introduction to microscopic life, using this episode as the diatom primer.
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3 comments from Hacker News
For anyone interested in learning about phytoplankton and other microorganisms, I highly recommend the YouTube series Journey to the Microcosmos , link For example this video about diatoms, which are responsible for a quarter to half of the oxygen produced on earth, ▶ this video link Seeing high-quality video of things moving around gives a much more visceral impression than just reading text interspersed with static images, in my opinion.
Diatoms are fascinating. I recently learned about them from an excellent Journey to the Microcosmos video: ▶ this video
> So many of the images that are captivating me have been taken at between 50 and 100 times magnification. 300-600x magnification is much better. ▶ this video