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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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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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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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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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How Does the Purple Bacteria Photosynthesize? Beckman Institute-UIUC (2015)

March 28, 2016 at 11:03 am / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Imagine a time when our young Earth was spinning much faster and days were only 8 hours! Our sun was much cooler and less bright than today. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Those were the conditions when first photosynthetic organisms with purple pigments evolved in liquid environments. In this animation we see one such ancestral form of early anoxic photosynthesis taking place in the purple bacteria Rhodobacter sphaeroides in which oxygen is not produced. Life evolved into oxygen […]

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The Carnivorous Venus Flytrap Plants Can Count – Jennifer Böhm (2016)

February 27, 2016 at 3:09 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video

Researchers at the University of Würzburg, in Germany have shown for the first time that carnivorous Venus flytrap plants (Dionaea muscipula) have the ability to track time between two stimuli 20 seconds apart precisely. This time keeping ability is a remarkable evolutionary adaptation that minimizes false signals that may lead to unnecessary trap closure. Nature is full of random unexpected events and Venus flytrap survival depends on a reliable trigger mechanism for its trap closure. A sensitive trap closing due […]

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Evolution Timeline (John Kyrk)

January 5, 2016 at 10:58 am / Evolution, Global Patterns, Video

[This video has no sound] Timelines organize information in a linear sequence and help us learn detailed linked events and processes. The interactive cosmological and geological timeline provides a gateway to understand one of the most progressive concepts in recent human history: Evolution. This screen capture video makes a quick introductory summary of cosmological, geological and biological evolution. Significant events since the very beginning of our universe are demonstrated in a chronological order. Evolutionary timeline by John Kyrk is a […]

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Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) – Biosphere 2

December 29, 2015 at 11:24 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. -Samuel Beckett- Biosphere 2 started as quite an ambitious challenge. It crammed five biomes into 3 acres of sealed facility and tried to create a mesocosm experiment. It was a “ship-in-a-bottle” style miniaturization of ecosystems; a tiny little man-made Hawaii in the Arizona desert (Hawaii is the only place on our planet where all biomes of the world, excepting Arctic Tundra exist). Biomes of the Biosphere 2 were […]

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Coelacanth: The Fish That Time Forgot – PBS NOVA (2001)

December 12, 2015 at 7:00 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Coelacanth morphology and genome has been extremely informative in understanding tetrapod evolution. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of a natural history museum in East London. In 1938 a local fisher brought a curious fish specimen which was to become a major discovery in evolutionary biology. Latimer described the fish as Latimeria chalumnae. The fish was over 1 m long, bluish in color. Most interestingly it had fleshy fins that resembled the limbs of terrestrial vertebrates. The discovery was a hugely interesting […]

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Secrets of the Hive – Why Puerto Rico’s Killer Bees Stopped Killing – Smithsonian Institution (2015)

October 27, 2015 at 1:04 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Human Nature, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Secrets of the Hive is a Smithsonian Institution documentary directed by Dennis Wells. It focuses on the decline of the honeybees and reviews potential solutions to restore pollination service provided by these important domesticated insects. A major emphasis of the documentary is on the Africanized honeybees. These bees are a result of a failed experiment that started with good intentions in Brazil. Researchers in 1950s wanted to introduce the genetic vigor lost in honeybees due to domestication. Trials to selectively […]

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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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