It really is amazing what you can do with lego these days. Especially if you’re Andy Carol, a software engineer at Apple, who makes working lego models of mechanical computers, such as the Babbage Difference Engine.

Carol’s latest creation is this astonishing recreation of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clockwork device made in Greece over 2,000 years ago (around 100-150 BCE) and salvaged from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean, in 1901. It wasn’t until 2006 that scientists explained exactly how it worked (see ‘In search of lost time’, Nature 444 534-538; 2006). The geared device would calculate the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets, and predict eclipses (and may have been based on even older, Babylonian, astronomical theories – as Jo Marchant outlines in a feature in Nature’s November issue).

Adam Rutherford, Nature’s chief audio and video editor, persuaded Carol to build the device, which was filmed in stop-motion over 40 days under the leadership of writer and filmmaker John Pavlus (whose blog explains more about the process). (The video can also be seen at Nature’s video channel).