Microcosmos

An hour of pure eye candy for fans of the insect world. I didn't expect the film to be quite this beautiful. You can stream the entire thing high-definition on Netflix (the narration is translated to English).

Ant Web

I saw this site yesterday. If you have any interest in ants, they have photographed and documented many of the world's 10,000 known species of ant.   http://www.antweb.org/

Ants are incredibly diverse. They can be as small as the point of a pin, or as big as a walnut. They can look as sleek as sports cars, or as bulky as tanks. AntWeb illustrates this diversity by providing information and high quality color images of many of the approximately 10,000 known species of ants. AntWeb currently focuses on the species of the Nearctic and Malagasy biogeographic regions, and the ant genera of the world. Over time, the site will grow to describe every species of ant known.

Photos of Dew Covered Insects

These are amazing photos that were taken before dawn, when insects are still covered in the tiny water droplets of the morning's dew. The artist is Polish amateur photographer Mirosław Świętek.

Ant Colony's Subterranean Structure

I am always interested in architecture that is created not from a particular blueprint, but from necessity itself... It is self-organizing, so there is never one single designer instructing how the structure should be built. Ant colonies are the perfect example of that. In these videos, scientists pour aluminum or cement into the tunnels and chambers of ant colonies, and upon excavation, it shows the vastness of a gigantic network of tunnels.

Nature by Numbers

A gorgeous animation about the patterns and mathematics found in nature.

Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

These engravings are from Robert Hooke's 17th century book, "Micrographia".  The National Library of Medicine has an incredible website, in which you can flip through historic books such as this.

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was an artist, biologist, physicist, engineer, architect, inventor and much else; a man who rubbed shoulders with many of the great minds of his time, and quarreled with most of them. Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses was Hooke's masterpiece, an exquisitely illustrated introduction to the microscopic world that lay all around

http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/books.htm