Antibiotics save people’s lives...and make bacteria stronger and more likely to kill us.  What is the best practice to balance these conflicting issues? In this problem-based learning module, the students will be evaluating real-life medical situations in conjunction with actual staff at those institutions and offering action plans to be ‘implemented’ there.  In order to accomplish this, the science unit will be interlocking with social studies and a language arts unit that will have them identifying target audiences and sculpting a way to present their findings.  This unit has the potential to be a full problem-based unit as well as highly interdisciplinary--it’s connected to full units in social studies and language arts which stand alone but can be fully integrated if desired.

Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Define biodiversityDescribe biodiversity as the equilibrium of naturally fluctuating rates of extinction and speciationIdentify historical causes of high extinction rates in Earth’s history

If you'd visited Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park 100 years ago, you probably would have encountered the alpine chipmunk, Tamias alpinus. Today, however, park visitors will have to hike up a nearby mountain to see one of these critters. That's because this species is sensitive to temperature and over the last hundred years of global climate change, Yosemite has warmed by about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit. As the temperature increased, the chipmunks retreated to higher and higher elevations where it was cooler. Today, they occupy a fraction of their original range. If climate change continues, they could be squeezed right off the tops of their mountains and out of existence.

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:

"Obesity and metabolic disorders are abnormally high in the Middle East. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 41% of all deaths in Kuwait are caused by cardiovascular disease. And after the US, Kuwait is the nation with the highest rate of obesity in the world. While overeating and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are partially to blame, they’re not the only culprits. A new study from the Dasman Diabetes Institute in Kuwait suggests that genetic adaptations once key to survival for Kuwaiti ancestors predispose today’s population to debilitating disease. Traits like insulin resistance and hypertension spell trouble for modern, largely sedentary humans. But for the nomadic forbearers of today’s Kuwaiti population, they offered an advantage. An active metabolism and high blood pressure stimulate the sympathetic nervous system’s “fight-flight-or-freeze” response, favoring survival under the harsh desert climate of the Arabian Peninsula..."

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

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:

"Cyanobacteria blooms in freshwater ecosystems are difficult to predict and can be harmful to humans and animals. Microcystis is a genus of cyanobacteria that can cause these toxic blooms. They form close associations with heterotrophic bacteria - their microbiome, but the details of these associations are not well understood. To examine this relationship, researchers characterized the genetic diversity of over 100 Microcystis colonies. They identified 18 distinct Microcystis genotypes. The genetic diversity was greater between colonies than within them, suggesting that Microcystis forms colonies via clonal expansion. Each Microcystis genotype had its own microbiome composition and related genotypes had similar microbiomes. Two of the nine most prevalent colony-associated bacteria genera, Roseomonas and Rhodobacter, showed strong signs of co-phylogeny with Microcystis. These closely associated bacteria may be expanding the metabolic capabilities of Microcystis..."

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

In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll learn about the ways population genetics reveals how groups of living things evolve—by comparing genetic similarities and differences. We’ll discover the most genetically diverse species of all (hint: it’s not us), find out why “race” isn’t the biologically valid category we’ve made it out to be, and learn there’s much more in our DNA that we share than that sets us apart.

Chapters:
Population Genetics
Genetic Diversity
Levels of Genetic Diversity
Melanin Variation
Clines & Ancestry
Race & Society
Review & Credits
Credits

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:

"Microbiomes across the entire planet connect numerous microorganisms to one another, but how are these communities themselves connected across the globe? To find out, researchers recently analyzed the massive Earth Microbiome Project dataset, which pools data about microbial life from around the world. The result was a planet-sized co-occurrence network of microorganisms. The network consists of 8 taxonomically distinct modules, each associated with a distinct environment. Studying the network’s shape revealed microbial relationships that are essential to certain microbiomes, including relationships characterized by distinct levels of competition or niche differentiation. The network highlights the importance of understanding co-occurrence features of microbiomes and could offer global insight into how and why microbes are connected..."

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