Home » Search results for 'HHMI'

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  Popped Secret: The Mysterious Origin of Corn – Nathan Dappen & Neil Losin – HHMI (2015)

  May 1, 2022 at 10:02 am / Evolution, Human Nature, Molecular Nature, Video

  Domestication of plants and animals is a key transformation in recent Human evolutionary history leading to sedentary farming societies. Domestication of Maize particularly followed a different trajectory from the agricultural crops of the old world. This HHMI documentary tells how the ancestral wild grass called Teosinte was domesticated to evolve into Maize. In the old world, most domesticated grasses had a surprisingly similar “first step” that paved the way towards agriculture. In old world grasses including rice, wheat, barley and […]

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  Identifying the Key Genes for Regeneration | HHMI BioInteractive (2017)

  February 19, 2019 at 8:14 pm / Evolution, Video

  All multi-cellular organisms have a healing response. Most have the ability to regenerate lost body parts. Plants regenerate in fairly similar ways across diverse families. Animals on the other hand show a remarkable diversity. One can shred a sponge into pieces but the cells can rearrange and organize themselves in a surprisingly rapid manner. Human tissue and organ regeneration is a curious goal for medicine. However in order to achieve this one must understand whether there are common cellular and […]

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  The Origin of Species: Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree – Dan Lewitt / HHMI (2013)

  January 30, 2019 at 12:07 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video

  Anole lizards together with cichlid fishes and Darwin’s finches are one of the star organisms in studying a rapid evolution pattern called adaptive radiation. Jonathan Losos is a veteran field biologist that has studied the traits that enable dozens of anole species to adapt to different niches in the islands of the Caribbean. Differences in limb length, body shape, and toepad size allow different species to be successful on the ground. However on vegetation surfaces such as thin branches, or […]

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  Galapagos Finch Evolution – Dan Lewitt – HHMI (2013)

  January 28, 2019 at 1:53 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video

  The Galapagos is home to many iconic species. Each are unique on their own and form a case study in evolutionary biology. Darwin’s finches and mocking birds with their striking beak morphology provided the first clues to Darwin in formulating the mechanism of evolution by natural selection. The Galapagos was the origin of the Origin of the Species. Finches in the island of Daphne Major have been studied for more than 40 years by Princeton University scientists Peter and Rosemary […]

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  Seed Dispersal and Habitat Fragmentation | HHMI BioInteractive – Danny Schmidt (2017)

  June 10, 2017 at 7:06 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

  Forests are under intense pressure. In the tropical forests, between 50-90 % of the canopy trees depend on animals for seed dispersal. Even in temperate forests animals such as deer, moose, boar and even bears disperse seeds. Today due to hunting for bush meat many tropical forests are becoming depleted of their seed dispersers. Here in this HHMI documentary, the researchers Andres Link and Carolina Urbina Malo of Los Andes University in Colombia in Colombia track brown spider monkeys to […]

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  Some Animals Are More Equal than Others: Keystone Species and Trophic Cascades – HHMI (2016)

  May 29, 2017 at 5:39 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

  On a field trip with students to the Pacific Coast, ecologist Robert Paine discovered a thriving community of aquatic organisms at Mukkaw Bay, at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. The tide pools were full of green anemones, purple sea urchins, pink seaweed, bright red Pacific blood starfish, as well as sponges, limpets, and chitons. At the low tide rocky surfaces exposed bands of small acorn barnacles, and large, stalked goose barnacles, beds of black California mussels, and some very […]

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  The Day The Mesozoic Died HHMI – Sean B. Carroll (2012)

  March 30, 2016 at 3:09 pm / Evolution, Global Patterns, Video

  This is one of the four educational video series by Sean B. Carroll produced for communicating evolution to public with the support of HHMI. Today we know the cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. This knowledge was produced by the meticulous coordinated work of many scientists. The Day The Mesozoic Died focuses on how scientists do the detective work using the scientific method. The discovery that an asteroid struck the Earth 66 […]

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  DNA transcription as the First Step of the Central Dogma of Biology | HHMI (2015)

  October 24, 2015 at 1:26 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

  What reads the information stored in our genes? How is it read? DNA transcription is the first step. Transcription is an amazingly beautiful process that take place in every (every!) living cell. In this animation produced by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute – HHMI you can see how a multi-part enzyme called RNA Polymerase II reads and writes the information stored in DNA into RNA. This is the first step of the Central Dogma of biology. RNA polymerase is a […]

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  The Origin of Birds – Dan Lewitt – HHMI (2015)

  March 5, 2015 at 10:52 am / Evolution, Video

  The Great Transitions is a three part documentary covering evolutionary origins of land vertebrates tetrapods, birds and Humans. In this second installment of the series, paleontologist Julia Clarke tells how birds evolved from dinosaurs. When the first Archaeopteryx fossil was discovered in a quarry in Germany in the early 1860s it created a lot of excitement. The discovery came only a few years after the publication of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Since then dozens of Archeopteryx fossils […]

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  Great Transitions: The Origin of Humans – Rob Whittlesey – HHMI (2014)

  February 11, 2015 at 11:25 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

  What did the common ancestor of Humans and chimpanzees looked like? This is not something we can triangulate simply by looking at a modern chimpanzee and Human. All the evidence points that Africa is the home continent for primates. Paleontologists are working hard to find the fossils that help us understand the key stages in Human evolution. Molecular genetic analysis of modern Human and chimpanzee revealed a very high degree of similarity. Through DNA hybridization experiments it was estimated that […]

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  The Origin of Tetrapods – Rob Whittlesey – HHMI BioInteractive (2014)

  January 30, 2015 at 3:13 pm / Evolution, Video

  The program takes us into the fascinating saga of discovery of the tetrapods that explains how limbs of the terrestrial vertebrates came to be. Watch how the legendary 375 million year old Devonian tetrapod fossil Tiktaalik was discovered after a series of adventurous Arctic expeditions. Tiktaalik means “Little fish in water” in Netsilik Inuit language. Neil Shubin provides a first-hand account of the search for Tiktaalik and the evolution of four-legged animals. The limb structure in Tiktaalik appears as a […]

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  The Making of a Theory: Darwin, Wallace, and Natural Selection – John Rubin – HHMI (2014)

  January 20, 2015 at 2:36 pm / Evolution, Video

  This documentary does it right. The theory of evolution was co-discovered independently by two biologists that lived within the same time period. Darwin and Wallace were well known in their time but Wallace’s name gradually has been overshadowed by Darwin. Today we rarely (almost never) hear the name Alfred Russell Wallace. This documentary does a good job to revive Wallace’s name. Wallace was quite an impressive personality and his life most certainly was inspirational. He knew what “survival” really meant. […]

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  The Making of the Fittest: Evolving Switches, Evolving Bodies – HHMI – Sean Carrol (2012)

  April 22, 2014 at 11:07 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history, Video

  Evolving Switches, Evolving Bodies is one of the series of educational videos called The Making of the Fittest by Sean Carroll for communicating biological evolution to public with the support of Howard Hughs Medical Institute – HHMI. Evolution is thought to be acting very slow usually over millions of years. However, it can happen suprisingly quick. In this documentary, we look at a fish that evolved to change its body between two states reversibly multiple times over a few thousands […]

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  The Making of the Fittest: Birth and Death of Genes – HHMI – Sean Carrol (2011)

  April 21, 2014 at 3:11 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history, Video

  A fish caught known as Crocodile fish or icefish in Antarctic waters by the Norwegian expedition in 1927 tells us another fascinating story on evolution of life. Birth and Death of Genes is one of the four educational videos Sean Carroll has produced for communicating biological evolution to public with the support of HHMI. These fishes (called Nothothenoids) are unique for they are the only vertebrates in the world that lack the oxygen-binding protein hemoglobin, which gives blood its red […]

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  Exploring the Amazon – Kew Botanic Gardens (2016)

  October 20, 2022 at 1:33 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, Video

  This short documentary outlines a joint expedition to the Parc Amazonien de Guyane organized by CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), the French Foreign Legion and Kew Botanic Gardens. The area could be rather hostile to scientists where illegal gold mines are in operation in remote and unexpected places along French Guiana-Brazil border. As the prominent tropical biologist Stephen Hubbell described in the foreword of his book Neutral Theory of Biodiversity the state of tropical biology is still resembling […]

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