It's no secret that greenhouse gases warm the planet and that this has dire consequences for the environment whole islands swallowed up by rising seas, animal and plant species stressed by higher temperatures, and upsets in ecological interactions as populations move to cooler areas. However, carbon dioxide has another, less familiar environmental repercussion: making the Earth's oceans more acidic. Higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mean that more carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean. This dissolved carbon dioxide forms carbonic acid the same substance that helps give carbonated beverages their acidic kick. While this process isn't going to make the ocean fizzy anytime soon, it is introducing its own set of challenges for marine organisms like plankton and coral.

In this project, each student will be assigned to a group of three to four students. Each group will be given random character description cards. These characters will be treated as the first generation in a fictitious town. The cards will include specific genetic traits, skills, jobs, as well as reference if the character suffers from type 2 diabetes. Students will need to use the character cards to author and illustrate a short story about the fictitious town which follows at least three generations of the families in the cards. Students must also include pedigrees for a minimum of three traits as well as diabetes as evidence of inheritance.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Actinobacteria are some of the most widely distributed bacteria in soils and are well known for their ability to degrade plant residues in pure culture in the laboratory. Yet, despite the importance of microbe-driven decomposition to carbon sequestration in terrestrial systems, their importance and specific activity across diverse environments in the field are unknown. Researchers recently evaluated the ecophysiological roles of Actinobacteria in rice straw residue decomposition in a series of field and microcosm experiments. They found that although Actinobacteria represented only 4.6% of the total bacterial abundance, they encoded 16% of the total carbohydrate-active enzymes (CAZymes) involved in the breakdown of carbohydrates. The researchers also found that Actinobacteria taxonomic and functional compositions were relatively stable during straw decomposition and that the importance of Actinobacteria in decomposition increased as soil fertility decreased..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource includes three classroom-tested activities that were created using the ideas outlined in the article “Getting more out of animations” by Pruneski and Donovan (in press). The driving idea is that animations can be a powerful tool for learning complex biological processes, but when students are passive viewers, it limits their usefulness and may become simply another source of content to be memorized. Engaging students with animations can greatly increase the amount of information that can be extracted and can help students develop important learning skills that can be useful in the future.

These sample assignments help make the use of animations more effective and active by structuring student viewing using guiding questions. These questions focus on particular objects, features, or steps of the process to help students accomplish specific learning objectives for that topic. The assignments also help students think about animations as media objects that are created by scientists and animators using specific tools and conventions that affect how the process is depicted and the ways in which it should be viewed. Lastly, by comparing and contrasting multiple animations of the same process, students can extract more information, overcome the limitations of each individual animations, and generate a more complete view of the process.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Cases of the fungal disease candidiasis in infants have been increasing over the past two decades, but our understanding of the behavior and evolution of Candida spp. outside laboratory models has been lacking. Researchers assembled new C. albicans and C. parapsilosis genomes using data from premature infant feces, hospital surfaces, clinical samples, and non-hospital environmental samples. Relative to an existing reference genome, the C. parapsilosis genomes analyzed had genomic “hotspots” of single nucleotide variants, and the C. parapsilosis genomes from premature infants had hotspots that matched hospital and subway surface samples, which may suggest a common ancestor. The researchers also analyzed a microbial gene expression time course in one infant being treated for Candida infection. The in situ transcriptomic profiles were highly variable relative to cultured C..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Economists can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Prof. Lo cuts through the debate in this course with a new framework—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis—in which rationality and irrationality coexist.
Topics:

Introduction and Financial Orthodoxy
Rejecting the Random Walk and Efficient Markets
Behavioral Biases and Psychology
The Neuroscience of Decision-Making
Evolution and the Origin of Behavior
The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis
Hedge Funds: The Galapagos Islands of Finance
Applications of Adaptive Markets
The Financial Crisis
Ethics and Adaptive Markets
The Finance of the Future and the Future of Finance

As part of the Open Learning Library (OLL), this course is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling. Resources on OLL allow learners to learn at their own pace while receiving immediate feedback through interactive content and exercises.

Finches on the Galapagos Islands have evolved to exploit almost every possible niche. This diagram shows the range of food sources available on the island and the different beak shapes adapted to exploit each of them.

En este curso el estudiante perfeccionará su comunicación oral y escrita mediante el estudio y la discusión de temas relacionados al impacto social y cultural de la ciencia y la tecnología en ciertas sociedades hispanas. Algunos de los temas a tratar son los efectos de los cambios tecnológicos en la estructura familiar y comunitaria, en las relaciones entre los sexos, en la identidad personal y cultural, en el mundo natural y en los sistemas de valores, la religión, la educación y el trabajo. También se examinan y discuten diversas actitudes hacia la innovación tecnológica y científica así como las ramificaciones éticas de las decisiones tecnológicas.

This course considers films spanning the entire career of pioneering Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), from his silent surrealist classic of 1929, Un perro andaluz, to his last film, Ese oscuro objeto del deseo (1977). We pay special attention to his Mexican period, in exile, and the films he made in, and about, Spain, including his work in documentary. It explores Buñuel’s early friendship with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, surrealist aesthetics, the influence of Freud’s ideas on dreams and sexuality, and the director’s corrosive criticism of bourgeois society and the Catholic church. We will focus on historical contexts and relevant film criticism.
About This Course on OpenCourseWare
The instructor of this course, Elizabeth Garrels, is a Professor Emeritus at MIT. She retired in 2014 after 35 years at the Institute. Professor Garrels taught this course for over 15 years, and it evolved over this time period. Normally, a course on OCW represents the version of a course taught during a specific semester and year. However, for this course we hope to represent the evolution of the course during the main years it was taught. The materials you see here are not from a particular iteration of the course, but are drawn from all of the years the course was taught.

North American ecosystems have fundamentally changed over the late Pleistocene and Holocene; from a system dominated by mammoths, to bison, to domestic livestock. Given the very different body size and herd formation of these 'ecosystem engineers', it is likely that animals influence soil structure, water tables, vegetation and other animals in the ecosystems. What has been the ecological influence of the continued 'downsizing' of the largest animals in the ecosystem?

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This course meets weekly to discuss recent aerospace history and current events, in order to understand how they are responsible for the state of the aerospace industry. With invited subject matter experts participating in nearly every session, students have an opportunity to hone their insight through truly informed discussion. The aim of the course is to prepare junior and senior level students for their first industry experiences.

Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounts the full trajectory of African-American history in his groundbreaking series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. The series explores the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed — forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds.

Using video clips from The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, this collection of lesson plans addresses a wide range of themes of the African-American experience from 1500 to the present.

In this module, students prepare and run an agarose gel that they use to separate DNA molecules of various sizes. Students stain the gels with ethidium bromide to visualize the positions of DNA molecules. Students estimate the sizes of separated DNA molecules by their migration distances relative to those of molecular weight standards. This module is part of a semester-long introductory lab class, Investigations in Molecular Cell Biology, at Boston College. 

During World War Two, a fierce battle between American and Japanese forces on Kwajalein atoll left a trail of debris on the deep lagoon floor. This lagoon now has one of the largest collections of well-preserved aircraft in the world. In this video, as part of the first ever film crew allowed onto this secret military base, Jonathan explores a B-25, F4-U Corsair and Dauntless dive bomber still sitting on the bottom of the ocean, as if ready to take off. Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

This course is offered to undergraduates and addresses several algorithmic challenges in computational biology. The principles of algorithmic design for biological datasets are studied and existing algorithms analyzed for application to real datasets. Topics covered include: biological sequence analysis, gene identification, regulatory motif discovery, genome assembly, genome duplication and rearrangements, evolutionary theory, clustering algorithms, and scale-free networks.

"Normally, an animal gets half its DNA from its mother and half from its father. But Dolly had three mothers: one mother gave Dolly her DNA; one supplied an egg; and the third, her surrogate mother, gave birth to her. Dolly is an identical twin of the mother who gave her her DNA. But Dolly is six years younger."This kid-friendly Web page helps kids understand how and why Dolly was cloned, and understand the potential benefits of cloning as well as the controversy it raises.

Allele frequencies in populations and how they differ from genotype frequencies. Created by Sal Khan.

A gene as a stretch of DNA on a chromosome. Alleles as versions (sequence variants) of a gene.

In this Evolution Web feature, test your skills at judging who's who on the tree of life while you learn about the tools and methods of cladistics.

These images from the Smithsonian Institution depict Nancy Knowlton's work with snapping shrimp in Panama. Knowlton found that the closing of the isthmus -- dividing the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean -- resulted in new species of shrimp.