Understanding Evolution

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.

Evolution Extension: Hominoid Drawings The seven drawings available for downloading from this site, in PDF format, were drawn by Ryan Scott McCullar*, for Martin Nickels at Illinois State University. Each one is a full scale profile, identified, and with a metric ruler for convenience (and to confirm the scale). If you can use a laser printer (e.g. at your district office, school, or local library), your results should be of very good quality, although inkjet printouts should be quite usable. A fast internet connection would also facilitate your downloading success. Each drawing requires about 100K of memory, so, in order to speed up the download time, they are available separately, and must be downloaded as seven separate items. To retrieve each item, just click on its name (in dark blue print) below.

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 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.

Human Evolution: The fossil evidence in 3D Welcome to the UCSB online 3D gallery of modern primate relatives and fossil ancestors of humans. This gallery contains five modern primate crania, and five fossil crania. The crania can be rotated 360 degrees. Each cranium is accompanied by a short description of its relevance to human evolution, and a site map. You will need the Shockwave plugin from Macromedia to view this gallery (most browsers have this installed already).

125 Great Science Videos: From Astronomy to Physics & Psychology Astronomy & Space Travel A Brief, Wondrous Tour of Earth (From Outer Space) - Video - Recorded from August to October, 2011 at the International Space Station, this HD footage offers a brilliant tour of our planet and stunning views of the aurora borealis.A Universe from Nothing - Video - In 53 minutes, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss answers some big enchilada questions, including how the universe came from nothing.A Year of the Moon in 2.5 Minutes - Video - The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been orbiting the moon for over a year. The footage gets compressed into 2 slick minutes.A Day on Earth (as Seen From Space) - Video - Astronaut Don Pettit trained his camera on planet Earth, took a photo once every 15 seconds, and then created a brilliant time-lapse film.Atlantis's Final Landing at Kennedy Space Center - Video - After more than 30 years, the space shuttle era comes to a close.

Reflections I quite like making posters (graphorisms, if you will), to collect up ideas from readings, articles, science and the like. I find orgnising the thoughts into something visual and attractive helps clarify them for myself and they add a splash fo colour to otherwise texty blogposts. I often attach them to tweets, and these tend to generate more interaction that text links alone. I usually use the Creative Commons search to find suitably-licensed Flickr images (if I don’t have my own). I edit them in GoogleSlides, using a partly-transparent text box at the bottom for citations and the ColorZilla Chrome colour picker add-on to match the colour palette. Sometimes I use ClippingMagic.com to remove backgrounds.

Activation Energy and Enzymes TITLE: Activation Energy and EnzymesSOURCE: Freeman, S, Biological Science, Second Edition, Pearson Prentice Hall, Inc.© 2006 Pearson Prentice Hall, Inc.KEYWORDS: Activation energy, enzymes, exergonic reactions, ATP, activation energy, catalysts, lock-and-key model, induced-fit model 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.

Artificial Selection in Evolution - Free High School Video What Is Artificial Selection? You've likely heard of natural selection, which is often described as the 'survival of the fittest.' This is a bit of a misnomer, because in evolution, individual organisms don't willfully adapt to their environment. Mars Exploration Program: Mars for Educators You can participate in four major programs: Curriculum Supplements Robotics activities are available. Download the activity summaries (PDF, 1.33 MB) or the full activity set (PDF, 1.08 MB).