Jonathan Eisen (@phylogenomics) shared this wonderful Lady Gaga lab spoof on Twitter the other day. It rocks.
And, it makes me wonder if my pals who've been thinking about getting students interested in careers by having scientists talk on camera might be going at this the wrong way. Sure, videos of scientists talking are totally fascinating (yawn..) and...
Oh right, where was I?
Well, here's the thing. If you want to get kids interested in something, you have to use something that interests them. Your strategy isn't going ... Read more
I'm currently at the Hi-Tec conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. (If you follow me on Twitter - www.twitter.com/@digitalbio - you may have seen me complaining about the temperature). It's an interesting conference, so I'm going to share some of the things that I'm learning.
Dr. Travis Benanti and Dr. Steve Fonash from Penn State University are presenting an interesting session this morning on nanotechnology.
Luckily, you don't have to know anything about nanotechnology to find ... Read more
This is a video that a friend made that shows, very clearly, how to pour an agarose gel, load the samples and run it. I especially like the way he used a bit of time lapse photography to show the dyes separating as the gel ran.
"Yo, you regulate it's genes"
The English makes me cringe, but I love the idea. Tom McFadden, an associate instructor at Stanford, has made a series of Biology rap videos and posted them on YouTube.
Yo, check it out.
If you haven't seen these, check out Jake Young's collection of videos showing T cells getting infected by HIV. The best one is at the bottom of the post.Read more
Have you ever wondered how to find things in the NCBI databases? Maybe you tried to find something but didn't know how it was spelled. Or maybe you tried to use a common name like "pig" or "deer" to find information in a database, not knowing that all the organism names are in Latin. Or perhaps you're wondering just what kind of information is stored for different kinds of records and if you could search for this information.
I wrote a book that covered this topic quite thoroughly, a couple of years ago, for the NCBI structure database ... Read more
Teachertube looks and works much like YouTube, but you're much less likely to run across videos that Not Safe For the Classroom.
All of these videos are made by students and teachers. According to the Dallas News, there are 54,000 videos on the site already and 800,00 visitors every day.
I especially enjoyed watching Abbot and Costello doing math problems.Read more
I made this video last night with a Flip Cam Mino. There are some kind of wild trippy effects. Sometimes it even looks like there's popcorn shooting out the top of the space needle. It was sure fun!
Happy New Year everyone!
Before mammals, before dinosaurs, before bacteria, or plants, there was something else; a protocell containing RNA.
The Exploring Origins Project has excellent animations of protocells, a timeline of life's evolution, and best of all- fantastic animations of ... Read more
This video from WDSU shows Mr. Green Genes, the transgenic kitty, in the dark and in the light. There's also an interview with Dr. Betsy Dresser, who very briefly talks about the work at the Audubon Center for Research on Endangered Species. Other than clips of the cat, and Dr. Dresser, the video mostly shows people taking frozen samples out of liquid nitrogen, but there's an interesting bit ... Read more
The Exploring Origins Project has excellent