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  UConn BioBlitz 2015

  February 23, 2019 at 3:37 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video

  On July 24th – 25th 2015, 49 experts collaborated with >150 citizen scientists to identify 1180 species in a 24-hour marathon of biodiversity survey (see a meta analysis at the bottom of this post). The UConn BioBlitz 2015 had many workshops that continued day and night including Bat activity monitoring, Blacklight/Mercury lamp curtain survey for nocturnal insects, setting camera traps for mammal activity, owl prowl, science expose, ants exploring space as well as tours of Collections Facility and the UConn […]

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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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  Becoming: Development of a Salamander Embryo – Jan van IJken (2018)

  February 10, 2019 at 9:59 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video

  Everyone of us started life from one single cell formed by the fusion of an egg and a sperm. That single cell gave rise to every structure in our bodies. How did that happen? Salamanders especially the axolotl are known to be able to regenerate limbs while frogs and lizards cannot. How and why? The Dutch filmmaker Jan van IJken did a superb job bringing a fresh new artistic look into the fascinating process of vertebrate embryo development. The original […]

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  What Good are Introns Anyway? – Nature (2019)

  February 6, 2019 at 2:56 pm / Molecular Nature, Video

  Molecular Nature Introns are stretches of non-coding regions interspersed with the coding DNA in the genes of eukaryotic organisms. They are widespread, common and sometimes are ridiculously long stressing the economy of the cell. Burden of long introns is not limited to DNA replication which happens only once during cell division but continues to manifest itself at the transcription level where multiple rounds of RNA polymerase II activity consume energy proportional to the longevity of the cell. For instance, the […]

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