Why Diversity is Important
Diversity has been a recurring theme this semester. It started with the diversity conference our middle schoolers attended earlier this year, which, unfortunately, I’m not sure they got a lot out of....
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Assessment with the Toilet Paper Timeline of Earth History
With a larger class, and quite a bit of space in the gym, I had more flexibility working on the toilet paper timeline compared to the last time. Labeling the timeline in the gym. I built in a friendly...
View ArticleNatural Selection and Polar vs. Grizzly Bears
What I end up seeing, in this quintessentially 21st century creature, is a glimpse of the future. — Gamble (2012): One, two, three, er…many. in The Last Word on Nothing. The effect of rapid Arctic...
View ArticleBreeding Drug Resistant Bacteria at Farms
Modern commercial farming uses a lot of antibiotics, and, as a consequence, we’re beginning to see them breeding drug resistant bacteria (see here for exponential growth demo). Jeremy Laurance reports...
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Horizontal Gene Transfer: Plasmids
Peter Eisler has a somewhat scary article on the development of drug resistance in bacteria at the University of Virginia Medical Center. The bacteria were resistant to all of their antibiotics....
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Terraforming Earth
Before: Barren, Volcanic. Image by Ben Tullis via Wikimedia Commons. Charles Darwin and colleagues attempted to vegetate the barren, volcanic Ascension Island with plants from botanical gardens around...
View ArticleChoosing Extinction
We talked about the Voluntary Human Extinction Project (VHMET) in Environmental Science, when we were covering issues related to overpopulation and the need for genetic diversity. While I’ve never been...
View ArticleThe Faces of Our Ancestors
This fascinating video tries to trace the evolution of the facial features of our homonid ancestors over the last 7 million years. ↬ Kottke ↬ The Dish
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On Evolution
Carl Segan’s Cosmos series contains a wonderful overview of the history of life. The one possible criticism of the video is that evolution could be misconstrued as a gradual, linear process (although...
View ArticleNatural Selection by Alfred Russel Wallace
Everyone knows about Charles Darwin, but hardly anyone remembers Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. Darwin’s publication of the On the...
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Mars Colonization Project
My high-school biology class is taking their exam on genetics and evolution. To make the test a little more interesting, and to point out that there may be some relevance for this knowledge in the...
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