TalkingScience enjoyed a big night out: we went to the Discovery Channel’s New York premiere of the astonishing new series, Life. Everyone at TalkingScience loves nature, especially animals, and we want you to know: you can’t miss Life -- all nine parts, starting Sunday night, March 21!

Life is the result of Discovery’s collaboration with the BBC, known for Sir Richard Attenborough’s adventures with nature. Life’s patient cameramen spent months waiting for perhaps two hours of animal, insect, or plant activity. The result: lots of things in nature you’ve never seen before, but that you can fully appreciate now in slo-mo. If you’ve ever wondered how flying fish fly, why a Venus flytrap isn’t fooled by rain drops, how a lizard can walk on water, why tiny herring can dodge huge sailfish – Life shows you. The series also tells you what it was like to get those fantastic shots. One cameraman heard his pal shout, “Move!” and turned to see a Komodo dragon – and its mouth of shark-like, serrated teeth – at his shoulder. He moved.

We said hello to physicist Michio Kaku, who’s on Discovery’s Science Channel every Sunday night, answering science questions. And we hugged environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin, whose blog about climate change is going up on The New York Times’ editorial page. Andy’s a wonderful bluegrass musician, and a star of our TalkingScience Cabaret. If you’re applying to college, think about Pace University. Andy’s designing a course there on global warming.

Back to Life: we promise your mouth will hang open at the gorgeous photography. Your heart will turn over as you wonder whether that ostrich can escape three cheetahs, how that crab-eating seal can outwit a pod of orcas (there are good reasons they’re known as killer whales, whether a baby ibex will outrun a fox, if a lonely young male hippo can defeat an old “warlord” and find a mate. You’ll love the music, especially during the sequence where dolphins off the Florida Keys demonstrate their clever way of catching fish – something no scientist or photographer had ever seen before. You’ll agree: the world we live in is more beautiful than and just as amazing as Avatar’s Pandora.

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