The cells on this site are real

It is easy to make biology look like biology: blue helices, glowing particles, a 3D cell that never existed. We wanted the opposite. Every moving image on this site is real microscopy from published research, released by its authors under Creative Commons licences.^[1]

That one is a taste-bud organoid growing from stem and progenitor cells, imaged in 3D over 44 hours by Aihara and colleagues. Others show cells moving through living tissue beside a blood vessel, an epithelial organoid forming on a textured surface, and a yeast colony growing.

What we changed

We cropped out the scale bars, timestamps and figure labels, re-encoded the clips small enough for the web, and slowed some of them down. Every source is credited on our Acknowledgements page, with its licence.

The panel without footage

Our Approach page describes organic reality with four verbs: grow, divide, metabolize, evolve. We had real footage for three. Nothing we had shows evolution, so that panel has a diagram of generations instead. It would have been easy to put a beautiful clip there. It would also have been a small lie.

1. Notes
2. [1]Acknowledgements: full citations and licences for every clip. Source