Videos
Short films that tell the stories of some of the projects, each between five and eight minutes long. Every film is also embedded at the top of its web summary, and all of them are on the BootLoops channel on YouTube.
Earth science · 7:33
How Earth got its oxygen
Earth’s air held no oxygen until hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesis. Why? This film describes the Great Oxidation Event: the rapid increase in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen, and how the story is pieced together from atmospheric science, geology and chemistry, with the help of AI.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · David Johnston · Claude.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube
Linguistics · 5:25
Where the stress falls
Every language puts emphasis somewhere in a word, and many use the pitch of the voice to tell words apart. Linguists call these stress and tone. People have been writing the rules down for two and a half thousand years, a few languages at a time, and the descriptions are scattered across libraries, journals and the internet. This film follows that history and shows how an AI read those descriptions into one catalog of six thousand languages, and what kinds of questions such a catalog can help answer.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · Kevin Ryan · Matthew Gordon · Joe Pater · Claude. The catalog: accstack.org. Released under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube
Solar physics · 6:13
The aging of sunspots
Sunspots are knots of magnetic field on the Sun’s surface, large enough to swallow the Earth. They appear, grow and vanish within days to weeks. Astronomers have been monitoring sunspots since 1874. This video discusses how the record of sunspots was analyzed by two scientists using astrophysics, demography, statistics and AI to learn that sunspots age.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · Cecilia Garraffo · Claude.
También en español: embedded on the sunspots summary.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube
Ecology · 7:01
A forest observed, a forest deciphered
On Barro Colorado Island, in the Panama Canal, every tree in fifty hectares of old-growth forest has been tagged, mapped and measured eight times since 1982: more than two hundred thousand stems, three hundred species, and thirty years of work by field crews from ten countries, most of it generously made public. This video discusses how that record became the testing ground for mathematical theories of the forest: an exact solution of neutral theory, in which every tree has the same chances whatever its species, and a model that puts the species differences back in and forecasts, from each species’ measured life history, which ones gain large trees over a decade and which lose them. The story is pieced together from ecology, demography and mathematical physics, with the help of AI.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · James O’Dwyer · Claude. With thanks to the Barro Colorado Island forest census, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and ForestGEO.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube
Genomics · 6:21
Two kinds of time in gene expression
Every gene in a cell makes its RNA in bursts: it switches on, fires, and falls silent again. How often a gene fires and how long it waits between bursts are recorded in RNA counts from thousands of single cells. This video discusses how scientists found two kinds of timing in mouse genes: most switch on at random, but about one in seven waits days between bursts on a regular clock whose period tracks the DNA methylation of the gene’s promoter. The story is pieced together from molecular biology, statistics and physics, with the help of AI.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · Martin Hemberg · Claude. Data: Sandberg lab, Karolinska Institute.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube
Population genetics · 6:01
Two mutations at a time
The DNA differences among people alive today carry information about our ancestors’ history and the natural selection that shaped them. Much of this information is encrypted in large public genome databases, waiting to be extracted. This video discusses how scientists found evidence of gene conversion in DNA data of 113 people from The Gambia, and evidence of large dramatic events in 197 flies from Zambia. The story is pieced together from genetics, probability theory and physics, with the help of AI.
Film: Matthew Schwartz · Michael Desai · Claude.
Web summary · Download MP4 (14 MB) · Watch on YouTube