Time will tell

The movie camera is a marvelous tool in the hands of anyone, scientist or amateur, who is curious about time. The camera, after all, can control time--speed it up or slow it down--and so open a new and often surprising window on reality.

The best collection of time-altered movies on the Internet can be found at a site created by Red Hill Studios in Larkspur, California, in cooperation with the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. Appropriately, its address is playing withtime.org. Select "to see and do" from the bar at the top of the page and then go to "gallery." On nine pages of choices, you'll find an eclectic mix of fascinating movies that go beyond Harold Edgerton's familiar stop-action work with drops of milk and apples pierced by bullets. The site also encourages viewers to create their own time-lapse movie projects.

At "Plants in Motion" (sunflower. bio.indiana.edu/rhangart/plantmotion/ PtantsInMotion.html), maintained by Roger Hangarter, a biologist at Indiana University at Bloomington, is a collection of movie clips that make the growth of plants come alive. Choose from the category selections in the menu at the right, and watch the slender new stalks of sunflower seeds twisting toward the light, or the "sleep movements" of bean leaves responding to their biological clock.

Stephen Deban, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has a page with movies showing how fourteen species of salamanders zap insect prey with their tongues (autodax.net/feeding movieindex.html). The Department of Biology at the University of Alberta runs an unusual instructional multimedia site (www.biology.ualberta.ca/facilities/multi media). Click on the blue-lettered directions at the bottom of the page to see the time-lapse selections. You might want to skip a few if, like me, you're squeamish about bot flies, but don't miss the "Clam Escape Response"

I particularly liked a collection of movies from Erta Ale, an extremely photogenic volcano in Ethiopia (www.educeth.ch/stromboli/perm/erta/ movies-en.html). Scroll down this page and you'll find five accelerated clips of the lava lake. Like a miniature version of Earth's plate tectonics, thin slabs of basalt crust jostle about, driven by the heat below. New crust is quickly formed, then subducted and recycled. Another site, at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/Key words/Glacier.html), speeds up the movement of glaciers, some of nature's most famous slowpokes, in a series of satellite images.

Astronomy, too, benefits from the miracle of time-lapse photography. On Antonio Cicadao's "Lunar and Planetary Observation" page (www. astrosurf.com/cidadao/animations.htm) are beautifully presented solar and lunar eclipses, dancing satellites, and spinning planetary atmospheres. And at solarviews.com/eng/jupiter. htm#movie, click on "Animations of Jupiter" in the table of contents to view Jupiter's famous red spot. At the same Web site, another page (solar views.com/raw/nep/nepspot.mov), presents Neptune's dark spot.

Finally, the site of the Chandra Xray Observatory has a remarkable movie, taken over a span of half a year, of the pulsar at the center of the Crab Nebula (Chandra.harvard.edu/ photo/2002/0052/movies.html).Watch the spinning neutron star spew wisps and jets of matter and andmatter into the surrounding nebula.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science uniter living in Los Angeles.

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