Videos

How much is that pet plant in the window?

April 5, 2012
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How much is that pet plant in the window?

I hadn’t realised that there was research on creating interactive pet plants that are able to display emotions! From the description of “My Green Pet” (Hwang et al. 2010): “The difficulty that children have in perceiving plants as living entities has been verified by several studies. As an initial attempt to address this issue, we propose “My Green Pet”, an interactive plant for children. Through this, children enjoy human-like interactions with the plant and also perceive that this particular plant is living. This is achieved by personifying a regular plant by giving it human feelings and emotions, such as...

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Eukaryopolis – The City of Animal Cells

March 21, 2012
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Eukaryopolis – The City of Animal Cells

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A Green Light for Biology — Making the Invisible Visible

March 6, 2012
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A Green Light for Biology — Making the Invisible Visible

This discovery by Nobel prize winner Dr. Osama Shimomura known as Green Fluorescent has revolutionized molecular biology. Movement of living molecules generally can be seen but the advent of GFP made the invisible visible. The protein, found in jellyfish helps researchers track substances of all kinds, in real time, and show how they mark cells, maintain them and function in concert with other cells.

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Glowing “Kryptonite Sushi” – would you eat it?

March 5, 2012
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Glowing “Kryptonite Sushi” – would you eat it?

Yesterday I came across this video that demonstrates how to make Glowing Sushi, using genetically modified zebrafish to produce a fluorescent “kryptonite roll”. When I first watched the video, my main question was: Why would you want to use fluorescent GFP fish in sushi?! You would have to shine a UV light on your sushi roll while you eat it in order to get the glow effect. Surely there are better ways to enjoy your food than lighting a UV torch into each others mouths to see glowing chewed food. I also felt a bit annoyed. Things like this...

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White Blood Cell chasing Bacteria with Benny Hill theme and OM NOM NOM

March 1, 2012
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White Blood Cell chasing Bacteria with Benny Hill theme and OM NOM NOM

I didn’t want to change the video title because it was perfect.

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We have more in common than meets the eye – human and plant cells

February 10, 2012
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We have more in common than meets the eye – human and plant cells

It’s Friday and therefore I present you with two beautiful animations about the inner workings of a cell. Bring a packed lunch, your camera and a big bag of excitement and hop on the tour bus guiding you through an animal and a plant cell. “Over there you can see the world’s largest mitochondrion. Few people know that it was the inspiration for the Michelin man…” I hope that these videos will not only show you how complex and fascinating cells are, but also how much similarities there are between animal and plant cells. Cells rock!

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How to make your own CSI gel electrophoresis apparatus

February 8, 2012
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How to make your own CSI gel electrophoresis apparatus

This video explains how to build a gel electrophoresis apparatus, prepare an agarose gel and use it to separate food colouring dyes – and you can do all that in your kitchen! Very cool!

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Cell Respiration (woo hoo)

February 2, 2012
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Cell Respiration (woo hoo)

I gotta feeling that this song’s gonna be a useful song… written by Mr Hsu to the music of the BlackEyed Peas.

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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison

January 24, 2012
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Faces of Plant Cell Biology: Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison

Welcome to today’s installment of “Faces of Plant Cell Biology”! When I sent my five questions to Prof Pat Heslop-Harrison from the University of Leicester, I got something completely unexpected and utterly brilliant back: A full video interview in a virtual studio with its own talk show host! I immensely enjoyed watching Pat talking about his research and his advice for students and I hope that you will too. To me, this is the perfect example of how blogs and social media can be used in a fun and effective way to bring your science to a wider audience....

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Apoptosis as you have never seen it before

January 21, 2012
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Apoptosis as you have never seen it before

Apoptosis is a mechanism in which death of an unhealthy cell is initiated and orchestrated through a tightly controlled molecular cascade. The steps of this cascade are visualised in this video. Drew Berry, who created the stunning animation, says: “The technique I used to make it work was difficult and very slow to pull off. The whole 4 min sequence took me around 12 months to research, construct and generate the imagery. I think visually it is my most successful piece at showing the mechanisms that emerge from randomly wandering, cytoplasmic molecules and membrane bound receptors.” (Molecular Animation of...

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The Photosynthesis Song

January 14, 2012
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The Photosynthesis Song

This song is by Peter Weatherwall and currently has 1,118,097 views. Amazing!

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What are the parts of a cell? Even a friendly alien could understand this!

January 9, 2012
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What are the parts of a cell?

The Khan Academy is on a mission to provide free online educational resources for everyone, no matter if you are a student, teacher or “a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology”. With over 2700 videos available, they are doing very well! This blackboard-style video explains the different parts of a cell.

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