Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers takes us along on her epic quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late.
Beneath our feet lies a mystery. A complex underground network of mycorrhizal fungi keeps our ecosystem alive by exchanging nutrients and carbon with almost all plants on Earth. Remarkably, no one knows exactly how these sophisticated and ancient systems operate, or how they are affected by climate change.
The Underground Astronaut follows evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, named one of the 2022 TIME100 Next Innovators, on her quest to map the world's fungi networks and understand their behaviour before it's too late. A fragrant and high-stakes journey into the soil. “No fungi, no future.”
The Underground Astronaut is part of Ammodo Docs, a series of short documentaries about original minds in arts and science.
The turbulent journey of a huge crate never seems to end. It keeps getting smaller and smaller, and everyone has their own idea of what may be hidden inside. An elephant, a lion, or perhaps a bear after all?
A story about a pilot, a captain, a machinist, a driver, a mailman, a girl... and a giant box. What's in the box, the giant box that the pilot brought with him from a country, far, far away? Probably an elephant, the captain thinks, and very carefully he loads the box onto his ship. The ship hobbles and wobbles on the high seas. A strong gust breaks open the walls of the box creakingly. And what's in the box? Another box!
How to create a world of your own? Push back the limits of your imagination?
The Wonder Way is an exploration in search of extraordinary territories, terrestrial or celestial paradises, intriguing and uncharted. A journey out of time, seeking encounters with those who imagine other worlds within this world.
From Randlett King Lawrence's phantasmagoria to Charles Ross's astral sculpture Star Axis, through Jugnet+Clairet's enigmatic maps, Noah Purifoy's Desert Museum, Jean Wisniewski's Garden of Eden or Didier Queloz's first exoplanet, The Wonder Way takes us to the most striking universes and draws a new cartography of the world in a great breath of freedom and magic.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.