Posts by Uzay Sezen | Nature Documentaries

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X Inactivation and Epigenetics – Etsuko Uno & Drew Berry / WEHI (2012)

June 26, 2016 at 7:42 pm / Video

Why all calico cats are female? In all mammals sex is genetically determined by X and Y chromosomes. In Humans females carry two X chromosomes (XX). Males carry both X and Y chromosomes (XY). The mammalian Y chromosome has began to evolve from the X chromosome at about 170 million years ago. For some strange genetic recombinational quirk that happened in the ancestor of all mammals Y chromosomes lost their ability to exchange information with X. Currently, more than 95% […]

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Kon-Tiki Expedition – A Test of a Hypothesis for Human Gene Flow (1950)

June 22, 2016 at 2:46 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Kon-Tiki was a legendary expedition that was carried out in 1947 by Norvegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl. The expedition tested a hypothesis whether Pacific Islands could have been colonized from Americas and thus wanted to demonstrate that waterways were not barriers but means of transportation and gene flow for human populations. Peopling of the Pacific is a fascinating story. The Polynesians were without question the greatest open ocean voyagers in the human history. They built double-hulled canoes and traveled over the […]

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Animations of Unseeable Biology – Drew Berry – TED Talk (2011)

June 3, 2016 at 7:00 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Drew Berry introduces us to the fascinating world of molecules. Since the invention of X-ray crystallography our depth of understanding the molecular nature of things have skyrocketed. Year 2012 marked the centennial of the discovery of X-ray chrystallography by the Australian physicist William Lawrence Bragg who shared the Nobel Prize with his father in 1915. The technique was so powerful that since its discovery, it generated 28 Nobel Prizes including the discovery of DNA. the famous X-ray chrystallographical image #51 […]

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Anole Lizard Aggression – Neil Losin (2011)

May 31, 2016 at 11:34 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

We humans rarely have punch ups with each other to decide who will mate. However, an anole lizards life is frequently interrupted by brawls. Neil Losin is an evolutionary biologist from UCLA who studies aggressive behavior among anole lizards. Anole lizards not only have punch ups among each other (intraspecific aggression) but they also have such interactions with other species (interspecific aggression). This is when things get even more interesting. In less than 10 minutes this documentary outlines the research […]

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Bowerbird’s Grand Performance – Life Story – BBC

May 22, 2016 at 9:20 pm / BBC documentaries, Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Wildlife Documentaries

With its retina punishing feather colors this is a spectacular solo mating dance performed by a male bowerbird advertising his male qualities. The independent dilation and contraction of the pupils is a striking part of the choreography at the beginning of the performance. In Humans male brains perceive dilated eyes as a signal for sexual readiness of females. Seeing the exaggerated form here should make us curious about our “inner reptile” since birds and mammals have evolved from independent reptilian […]

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Learning to Live on the Moon – PBS

May 17, 2016 at 2:04 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Energy flows, nutrients cycle. This is how we can define working principles of an ecosystem in a nutshell. Our planet has a very complex land-air-water interaction and we are only beginning to understand the behavior of these systems by simplifying them in enclosed systems such as Landscape Evolution Laboratory (LEO). Due to its proximity, the Moon appears to be the most convenient celestial body to colonize. The Moon is so close that it can even occasionally get shielded by the […]

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Understanding Our Moon – NASA/SVS

May 17, 2016 at 2:02 pm / Video

The Moon has been a very influential body on life on Earth. Some argue that having a satellite like the Moon is a prerequisite for life in other planets. The Moon has a stabilizing effect on rotation axis of our planet. Without it, the axis would wobble more erratically making ice ages and inter-glacial warming periods more extreme and sudden. Understanding our Moon will help understand evolutionary history of our planet. After all, both bodies have started forming from the […]

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City Farms – KQED/QUEST (2013)

May 16, 2016 at 11:42 am / Human Nature, Video

On the forefront of Good Food Revolution Will Allen of Milwaukee demonstrates a working Urban Farm. He defines his effort as establishing oasis in a “food desert”. The program prepared by QUEST gives a brief biographical sketch and highlights from the project. Following a significant career in basketball, Allen decided to go back to farming. In 2008 he was granted a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his influential contributions to the urban agricultural practices. “The Great Migration transformed the […]

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Decoding the Chemical Language of Nature – Jing-Ke Weng | TEDxBeaconStreet (2015)

May 6, 2016 at 9:17 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history

Chemical diversity in nature is bewildering. Repertoire of chemicals in plants is especially rich. A great majority (almost all) of the single-compound drugs have been discovered in plants: salicylic acid (Aspirin), artemisinin (anti-malarial), thebaine (analgesic derived from opium) are just a quick few to spell out. All these chemicals are products of specialized secondary metabolic pathways in plants. Chemical compounds forming specialized metabolites protect plants against various abiotic stresses and mediate an array of interspecies interactions, ranging from seduction of […]

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Kars Ardahan Documentary – Alkım Ün (2007)

May 4, 2016 at 5:50 pm / Human Nature, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Director of the KarsArdahan documentary is an emerging Turkish documentarist Alkım Ün. In 2009 he received an award in Boston Turkish Film Festival with this production. Alkım Ün has a degree in biology education and has a particular talent in “reading the landscape” with the eyes of a biologist. Just before the project he had made lengthy observations on wildlife of the region. Kars – Ardahan Plateau is a biologically and geologically distinct region of Turkey. It sits between two […]

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Conserving Colombia’s Cotton-Top Tamarin – Federico Pardo (2011)

April 21, 2016 at 11:20 am / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

About the size of a squirrel, the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) is a New World primate. It has a characteristic shock of white hair on it’s head. Males and females do not vary in size (not sexually dimorphic). The cotton-top tamarin was declared endangered in 1973 following the exportation of 20,000-40,000 tamarins to the United States for use in biomedical research. Cotton-top tamarins were found to spontaneously develop colorectal cancer and for this reason served as an ideal model for […]

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The World’s Fastest Runner – Greg Wilson – National Geographic (2012)

April 14, 2016 at 10:42 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

A well-designed filming set up to capture the motions of running Cheetahs. Since late MIT professor Doc Edgarton’s time highspeed cameras have evolved wonderfully enabling technical capabilities for producing great slow motion films. In this production the filming crew used a Phantom Flex highspeed recording camera. The following talk by the director Greg Wilson gives us the behind-the-scenes view of the project. The entire set up was constructed on the running alley specially designed for exercising the Cheetahs of Cincinnati […]

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Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur – BBC (2016)

April 10, 2016 at 10:56 am / BBC documentaries, Evolution, Natural history

On February 19th 2016, a replica of the massive Titanosaurus dinosaur (Patagotitan mayorum) discovered in Argentinian Patagonia was unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is continuing to send strong waves of excitement to all natural history enthusiasts worldwide. Based on accurate dating of the volcanic ash surrounding the fossil we now know that the animal lived 100.6 million years ago during the Cretaceous. It belongs to the Sauropod group and yet is the largest […]

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Giant Ichneumon Wasp (Megarhyssa macrurus) Ovipositing

April 3, 2016 at 1:49 pm / Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

Giant Ichneumon wasp (Megaryssa macrurus, Linneaus 1771) ovipositing. 10th of August 2013, Georgia State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA. 3:47 pm. This observation has been registered in iNaturalist.org with ID# 418639. Oviposition marks the beginning of the life cycle of all insects including parasitoid wasps. Females of Megarryhssa macrurus (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) are specialized to lay their eggs in the burrows of wood eating Pigeon Tremex Horntail (Tremex columba) larvae between June and September. Only one egg is deposited per host larva […]

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What’s Really Warming Up Our Planet? NASA – SVS (2015)

April 1, 2016 at 2:09 pm / Global Patterns, Human Nature, Video

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) produced yet another visual to show how industrial and natural factors have been contributing to the global warming. These factors are wobbling of Earth’s axis, solar activity, volcanoes, land use, ozone pollution, aerosol pollution, greenhouse gases and their combined effects. The case is rather clear. Combined effects of man made factors follow the trajectory of warming closely. Since 1880 our planet warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit and continues to increase. The atmospheric carbon concentration has passed […]

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