Blog Archives
The Lion, the Watch and the Hormones
Tom McFadden and the Stanford Biologists are back with another lyrical science creation, The Lion, the Watch and the Hormones. It’s all about stress, yo, including short-term responses to danger and the negative health effects of chronic stress.
Really funny plasma membrane & Evolution raps
This is really well done, from a group of Stanford students:
And this one on evolution is very funny:
There are more cell biology clips on their YouTube channel.
BBC Cell Series
Dr Adam Rutherford presents Cell, a three-part series on the history and great discoveries in cell biology. WhyEvolutionIsTrue has HD-quality full episodes here:
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ToK issues and ideas of academic honesty abound in the series.
What is life and where does it come from?
How do we know that living things are made of cells?
What motivated (and still motivates) the great discoveries?
How and why did Virchow plagiarise Remak’s work on cell division?
What are the ethics of new and future developments in cell biology?
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*More downloads also available from RapidShare.
Biotech: The Musical (re-up)
Science + music + YouTube = awesome.
Here are some comedy highlights:
Bio-Rad are the leaders when it comes to making silly music videos to promote their products. The classic ‘PCR Song‘ is great for the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology topic:
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And you’ve got to love their follow up, GTCA So Fast – touting enzyme supermixes for the PCR process – this would fit in the DNA Replication section:
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Mass Spec-tacular for the chemists (Reach that Peak):
More musical mayhem after the jump…
Nature’s YouTube Channel (and some others)
On the heels of the NewScientist YouTube channel we have the offering from Nature. Where NewScientist provides a news-style clip of current Science headlines, Nature’s YouTube channel takes the approach of a video background to articles published in their journal. So far they have ten videos, though they provide useful background to articles such as the Antikythera mechanism, whale evolution and this one on sequencing the platypus genome:
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It’s an encouraging trend to see these journals reach out into internet video publishing – cheap, easy and a great starting place for students getting involved in science. Let’s hope Nature can keep their channel going longer than ScientificAmerican, who started strongly but seem to have given up.
Of course, the bees knees of YouTube channels so far are NationalGeographic, with 847 videos to date. Here’s a gratuitous Great White clip:
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JoVE
Another great channel (though not on YouTube) is the Journal of Visualised Experiments – actually publishing scientific research papers as videos. A good idea, and some really effective videos – especially for letting us see what is going on in the experiment or operation. Unfortunately, their videos can’t be embedded, so get yourself on over there and have a look.
Now comes the question of citing online videos in your work – and here is the answer! (pdf)
Other ‘tube’ resources worth a look are DNAtube and TeacherTube.
i-Biology 