Science News

Nature Video was invited to Windsor Castle to see some of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings. The drawings show that Leonardo did more than dabble in the sciences; he carried out experiments and made staggering medical discoveries which could have transformed the study of anatomy in Europe -- had they not languished unpublished for centuries. In this video, Senior Curator Martin Clayton shows us three of Leonardo's most intriguing anatomical studies.

Was Leonardo da Vinci's famous anatomical chart actually a collaborative effort? Claudio Sgarbi says he "was totally astonished" when he examined a manuscript including a drawing that seemed to prefigure Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

The Man whom i Admire a lot (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci)- The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything (Courtesy BBC)...

More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed a particular relationship between the size of a tree’s trunk and the size of its branches. Specifically, the combined cross-sectional areas of a tree’s daughter branches are equal to the cross-sectional area of the mother branch. However, da Vinci didn’t know why tree branching followed this rule, and few explanations have been proposed since then. But now in a new study, physicist Christophe Eloy from Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France, has shown that this tree structure may be optimal for enabling trees to resist wind-induced stresses.