The Big Bang gave birth to our uni­verse. But what will bring it to an absolute end? In 21 min­utes, a mere mega blip of time, this episode of Cos­mic Jour­neys offers an impres­sive visu­al account of this big enchi­la­da ques­tion, tak­ing you across tril­lions of years. The sun will die but make the earth unin­hab­it­able well before­hand. A sim­i­lar process of decay will play itself out across the uni­verse and we will enter the “degen­er­ate era.” Dark ener­gy, dead stars, and black holes will reign supreme. But what will hap­pen in the very, very end, when the cos­mic clock strikes a num­ber known as a “googol” or some time there­after? A lot of that will get sort­ed out by the work physi­cists are now doing with the Large Hadron Col­lid­er, the giant par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor locat­ed near Gene­va, Switzer­land. Give the video a lit­tle bit of time. The sec­ond half gives you the goods.

Hat tip to Wilter for send­ing this video our way.

Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel’s Life series has been receiv­ing a lot of rave reviews for its stun­ning footage of plants and ani­mals.  This excerpt show­ing creep­er plants climb­ing trees lives up to the hype. Leave it to a lit­tle time-lapse video–not to men­tion a voice-over by Oprah Winfrey–to blur the line between plant and ani­mal.

UPDATE: A read­er in Europe informed me that this video is appar­ent­ly being blocked out­side of the US. It’s extreme­ly rare that this hap­pens with YouTube videos (I’ve only seen it hap­pen with full movies), but for some rea­son, it hap­pened here. My apolo­gies. [Dan]

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Mass­a­chu­setts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Insti­tute for the Study of Psy­cho­analy­sis and Cul­ture. He also par­tic­i­pates in The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life, a pod­cast con­sist­ing of infor­mal dis­cus­sions about philo­soph­i­cal texts by three phi­los­o­phy grad­u­ate school dropouts.