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Diatoms: Tiny Factories You Can See From Space

Journey to the Microcosmos · 811.9K views · 2019-08-12 · 7:44

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend the series as an excellent, accessible introduction to microscopic life, using this episode as the diatom primer.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2024

Topics

Biology & biotechnologyAnimals & nature
Search by tags
diatomsmicroscopymicroorganismsalgaeoxygen

What people said

jacobolus · 2020-05 · Strong recommendation

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, [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.

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scghost · 2024-09 · Recommendation

Diatoms are fascinating. I recently learned about them from an excellent Journey to the Microcosmos video: [VIDEO]

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drran · 2020-10 · Reference

> 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. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Journey to the Microcosmos, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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