Data in research papers that is best presented in the form of videos gets short shrift compared to data that can be easily presented in figures and tables. Printing of representative video frames is a poor surrogate. Embedding videos in PDFs is possible but rare. Even online, where embedding videos in an HTML page is technologically easy, videos are usually provided only as links in the supplementary information for downloading video files.

This week, Nature Methods published two manuscripts from Keller and colleagues and Hufnagel and colleagues describing improved light-sheet microscopy technology that captures amazing time-lapse 3D images of fluorescently labeled cells in developing Drosophila embryos. To help showcase the beautiful videos containing this data we debuted new video functionality that Nature Publishing Group will be rolling out to other journals over time.

We invite you to watch these videos and let us know what you think about the new streaming video player, or the imaging method used to obtain this data. Some of the videos are very large and will take some time to start if you have a slow Internet connection but we hope that even in these cases you find this to be an improvement.

Of course, we still offer the ability to download the original video files supplied by the authors so you can see them in their original resolution, regardless of the speed of your connection.