Understanding Evolution

Biology Animations Carnegie Mellon's Office of Technology for Education and Department of Biological Sciences create multimedia materials for teaching and learning Biology. After an analysis of a number of Biology courses was performed to identify when and how shared concepts where taught, a team of biologists, media programmers, and learning experts came together to create animations designed to improve understanding of some of the main concepts taught in Modern Biology and Biochemistry. Phosopholipid Membranes Tutorial page describing the construction and properties of Biological Membranes. Biological Membranes Biological membranes are dynamic structures composed of a diverse set of phospholipid molecules and proteins. Phase Transition This tutorial explains how phospholipids bilayers undergo to a cooperative phase transition or melting that is similar to protein denaturation. back to index Signal Transdaction Serine Protease Uniport - Glucose Transport Symport - Lactose Permease Transporter ATP Synthesis

Evolutionary origins of the nervous system - Neurophilosophy THE human brain is a true marvel of nature. This jelly-like 1.5kg mass inside our skulls, containing hundreds of billions of cells which between them form something like a quadrillion connections, is responsible for our every action, emotion and thought. How did this remarkable and extraordinarily complex structure evolve? This question poses a huge challenge to researchers; brain evolution surely involved thousands of discrete, incremental steps, which occurred in the mists of deep time across hundreds of millions of years, and which we are unlikely to ever fully understand. Nevertheless, a number of studies published in recent years have begun to shed some light on the evolutionary origins of the nervous system, and provide clues to some of the earliest stages in the evolution of the human brain. The simplest nervous systems lack a brain, and instead consist of diffuse networks of nerves. “Such a complex arrangement could not have been invented twice throughout evolution. Related:

Espace des sciences - DARWin : la théorie de l'évolution et la génétique humaine - Introduction - Conférence - Questions du public A partir d'une approche historique de la façon dont ont été élaborées la théorie de l'évolution et celle de l'hérédité, on explorera les interactions complexes entre la biologie et la société. The Field Book Project What is a field book? Field books or field notes are primary source documents that describe the events leading up to and including the collection of specimens or observations during field research. Field notes can take many forms depending on the information needs of the collector. Importance and challenges of field books Field notes are significant sources of information related to scientific discovery. Field books as an object type are located and described in a wide variety of ways.

Home of CELLS alive! Dispatches from the birth of the Universe: sometimes science gets lucky For the generations that grew up with TV before the age of cable, the box in our living room was a time machine, capable of taking us back to just a few hundred thousand years after the birth of the Universe. We just didn't realize it. Nor did the scientists that discovered this, at least at first. But luck seemed to play a large role in one of the biggest discoveries of our lifetime. That may not have been the intended message of the discussion called "Dispatches from the Birth of the Universe," hosted by the World Science Festival on Friday. The panel provided a good picture of our current state of knowledge on the birth of the Universe, and a glimpse at what we'll likely find out next. Lawrence Krauss, who moderated the panel, introduced it by turning on an old TV set on stage. But, even after the birth of television, nobody realized what it was. But the background they detected from Earth was smooth, while we know the Universe is lumpy, filled with complex structures. And Mather?

Evolution MegaLab Edheads - Activate Your Mind! Make your own cartoons and animations easily. Our tools are free and you don't need to learn Flash. Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history NEW YORK (AP) — Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history. Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself. Sometime in the next 15 to 30 years, the Kenyan-born paleoanthropologist expects scientific discoveries will have accelerated to the point that "even the skeptics can accept it." "If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive," Leakey says, "then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges." Leakey, a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, recently spent several weeks in New York promoting the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya. The institute, where Leakey spends most of his time, welcomes researchers and scientists from around the world dedicated to unearthing the origins of mankind in an area rich with fossils. View gallery

Open Education and Bio380 lecture on Neanderthals This academic year I have set myself the goal of making all my lecture available for all, in the public domain, via YouTube and maybe also Slideshare. The technical side of doing this is fairly straightforward (capture a screen movie via QuickTime), but the major hassle is ensuring and documenting permissions for all images. In my first attempt, I quickly realised that putting this information on the same slides as the images led to cluttered chaos, so I have piled them all up at the end of the talk. It is unclear to me what the rules are about using material from published papers, but cannot see how authors would not want students to know about their work. It will be interesting to see if anyone other than my own students look at this stuff, but here we go, the game's afoot! Here is my first lecture for this year from the Bio380 course: Waking the Dead, on Neanderthals and their influence on the modern human gene pool. Slidecast via YouTubeSlides via Slideshare