BIOLOGY: "CRACKING THE CODE OF LIFE!"

During Tuesday's Biology classes, students were asked to complete a worksheet based on the video 'Cracking the Code of Life.'  The video viewed in class, and thus the handout based on it, can be viewed on-line here:







There is an entire PBS-sponsored web site to accompany this program. It's truly excellent, and since I can't show the entire program within a regular class. I can, however, assign a segment of it along with Section 14.3 of our text to help students understand the material and complete the worksheet. So, read that section, watch video segments 4-8 and complete your work, students!

BIOLOGY: "DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA"

Episodes from PBS's "Evolution" series have been previously featured in instruction.   The centerpiece of that series, a two-hour episode entitled "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", will be shown in class in its entirety over the course of several lessons (we are, in fact, close to completing it).   Students have been given a study guide to this video, which not only uses actors to reenact key events in Darwin's life, but provides vivid demonstrations of Darwin's ideas, and how scientists explore these ideas today.

Students will be expected to complete the study guide based on the video, which will involve writing short responses (1-2 paragraphs) to a series of prompts to specific parts of the video.   As such, they may find it necessary to review the video.  

The paragraphs generated by students will be critical to completing their final quarter project in this course, so it is vital that all students complete the study guide immediately.   The entire video is available through this YouTube channel, broken into 11 segments that roughly correspond wtih the 12 chapters in the assignment.

(For your convenience, I have embedded all 11 videos on this page, but these may not be visible on FUSD computers or on others that do not have recent versions of Java to run flash-based media.  If you are unable to open the individual videos on this post, go to the link above and watch them directly on YouTube)

Chapter 1. Prologue
Chapter 2. Common Ancestry









Chapter 3. Ecuador and the Tree of Life





Chapter 4. Natural Selection





Chapter 5. Mutation and HIV





Chapter 6. Complexity





Chapter 7. How The Eye Evolved





Chapter 8. God





Chapter 9. A Scientist Discusses Religion





Chapter 10. The Human Question





Chapter 11. Humans and The Tree of Life Chapter 12. Epilogue





Finally, here is the PBS web site that accompanies the entire series.
 
You can also watch parts of the videos there, but they are lower in resolution.

BIOLOGY: "EXTINCTION!"

EXTINCTION Monday and Tuesday's classes featured excerpts from 'Extinction!', which isNOVA's 'Evolution' series (2001). The video begins with paleontologist Peter Ward hunting for Permian fossils in South Africa's Karoo Desert, and relates ecological pyramids (which are like a 'house of cards') to mass extinctions, which are believed to be rare but important events in the history of life. It then follows the work of American Museum of Natural History researcher Michael Novacek in building the fossil record of small, shrew-like mammals from the Mesozoic, representative of the lineage that will survive the next mass extinction (the K/T event), which will claim the dinosaurs.
Episode 3 from

It concludes with an examination of the role of human activity in accelerating the rate of extinction, with important attention to conservationists like Alan Rabinowitz.


Students have been given a worksheet based upon this video as homework, which is now due. I encourage students to watch the video in its entirety for themselves if there are points that they don't get in class. We simply do not have enough class time to review this, but I know many students will want to see the whole story again, either by going to Google Video or watching it here:

VIDEO: HOW THE EARTH WAS MADE

The following video segments were shown in class and form the basis of a video worksheet.  The focus of this material is how the geological record provides evidence of how the Earth has changed over time, particularly with respect to the atmosphere:





And here's the second segment...

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: "EXTINCTION!"

EXTINCTION Monday and Tuesday's classes featured excerpts from 'Extinction!', which is Episode 3 from NOVA's 'Evolution' series (2001). The video begins with paleontologist Peter Ward hunting for Permian fossils in South Africa's Karoo Desert, and relates ecological pyramids (which are like a 'house of cards') to mass extinctions, which are believed to be rare but important events in the history of life. It then follows the work of American Museum of Natural History researcher Michael Novacek in building the fossil record of small, shrew-like mammals from the Mesozoic, representative of the lineage that will survive the next mass extinction (the K/T event), which will claim the dinosaurs.

It concludes with an examination of the role of human activity in accelerating the rate of extinction, with important attention to conservationists like Alan Rabinowitz.


Students have been given a worksheet based upon this video as homework, which is due on Monday. I encourage students to watch the video in its entirety for themselves if there are points that they don't get in class. We simply do not have enough class time to review this, but I know many students will want to see the whole story again, either by going to Google Video or watching it here:

THE LIVES OF THE STARS

The following episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, 'The Lives of the Stars', forms the basis of a student homework assignment. Click on the icon below to play the video within the blog:

 

COSMOS

The following episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, 'The Lives of the Stars', forms the basis of a student homework assignment. Click on the icon below to play the video within the blog:

You can also go to Snag Films directly here.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: "COSMIC VOYAGE"

Environmental Science students will be viewing a 36-minute IMAX video in class and completing a worksheet based on part of the video. 

The film, 'Cosmic Voyage', was made in 1996 for the Smithsonian Institute and was clearly inspired by a classic science education film called 'Powers of Ten', originally produced in 1977 by the husband-and-wife team of Rae and Charles Eames.

'Cosmic Voyage' approaches the idea of using the metric system, which is based on powers of ten, to explore the question: "What is really large, and really small?" The film first zooms out from an acrobat's ring in St. Mark's Square in Venice, the place where Galileo first trained his telescope on the heavens.


Through 23 powers of ten, we leave first the Earth, then our solar system, then the Milky Way Galaxy behind, until we reach the limit of modern astronomy, where we can see images from about 13 billion years past.


Reversing course, the video then zooms in on drop of water in the Dutch town of Delft, where Antonie Van Leuuwenhoek first trained his early microscope to discover the hidden world of microbes.



As we zoom in on a paramecium, we penetrate its cell nucleus, then zoom in on a molecule of DNA.


Within that molecule is a carbon atom, and the world within that atom is mostly empty space! Within the atom, the atomic nucleus contains virtually all of an atom's mass, made of particles called protons and neutrons. These, in turn, are formed from even smaller particles called quarks.

The film continues with a discussion of the search for a fundamental theory in physics through the use of particle accelerators like Fermilab, along with an overview of the likely "recent" events that led to our sun, our solar system, the Earth and life itself.

Here, presented on YouTube, is the first segment (Chapter 1) of the film who wish to review the material or share it with others. As the narrator (Morgan Freeman) intones, 'we are all travelers on a voyage of discovery!' Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 can be assessed at YouTube directly or by clicking on the hyperlinks