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Cuckoos and their victims
The sight of a little warbler feeding an enormous cuckoo chick has astonished observers since ancient times. It was once thought that cuckoos were unable to raise their own young because of defective anatomy and behaviour, and so other birds were onl....
More details | Watch nowThe Science of Chillies
Can the wheat which grows in dry areas solve the food crisis?
Chiho describes her important work in looking for varieties of wheat which could help increase food production in arid areas.
More details | Watch nowGrowing gold-banded lilies with fungi
Tomoha describes her work in helping preserve this threatened species of plant.
More details | Watch nowWheat gets over global warming.
Nao describes her work in investigating the ways in which wheat can be made to cope with the higher temperatures expected from global warming.
More details | Watch nowSoil Recovery by Re-use
Aki decribes her experiments in improving soils using various buffering materials.
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An interesting look at how the direction of water flow affects shell growth in barnacles.
More details | Watch nowBacterial cell walls, antibiotics and the origins of life
The cell wall is a crucial structure found in almost all bacteria. It is the target for our best antibiotics and fragments of the wall trigger powerful innate immune responses against infection. Surprisingly, many bacteria can switch almost effortl....
More details | Watch nowGreen Fluorescent Protein: Lighting up Life
The accidental discovery of this wonderful tool has changed the face of biology.
More details | Watch nowThe End of Disease
Understanding the Cell cycle
The biology of Striga
One of the major parasites is striga, a weed that sucks the juice and nutrients from cereal crops such as millet, sorghum and maize and causes great yield losses. A single striga plant can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds. The seeds are so tiny....
More details | Watch now‘Witch Weed’ – breaking the spell
Striga (witchweed) is a parasitic weed that seriously constrains the productivity of staples such as maize, sorghum, millet and upland rice on some farms in Uganda. Kilimo Trust supported this initiative to try and control its spread.
More details | Watch nowWhy the Preservation of the Rhino is Destroying our Planet
Is there a collision between conserving a single rare species and much wider habitat preservation.
More details | Watch nowGenetic control and the mammalian radiation
To grow tissues in our body two key types of DNA control how, where and when to build essential proteins. Recent comparisons of mammal genomes show that instructions coding how to build proteins are similar across diverse species. In contrast the gen....
More details | Watch nowTargeting the human kinome: cancer drug discovery
This lecture discusses how the discovery of the Philadelphia chromosome provided the first example of a link between cancer and a recurrent genetic abnormality. This chromosomal translocation, which results in activation of the Abl protein kinase, re....
More details | Watch nowHow embryos build organs to last a lifetime
All the organs of our body originate from small founder populations of cells which multiply into complex structures. ÊAdult stem cells are used to maintain organs throughout adult life and to repair or regenerate them after damage.Ê Focusing on the....
More details | Watch nowNeuroNavigation: how the brain represents the space we live in and finds our way around
Learning about new environments or locating ourselves in familiar environments are some of the most fundamental tasks that the brain performs. Information is not stored in response to biological needs such as hunger or thirst but on the basis of cogn....
More details | Watch nowFrom bench to bedside: KATP channels and neonatal diabetes
Whether you eat a whole box of chocolates or fast for the day, the pancreatic beta-cells ensure that your blood glucose level remains relatively constant by regulating the release of insulin from the pancreatic beta-cells. Diabetes results when insul....
More details | Watch nowGenetic fingerprinting: past, present and future
Alec Jeffreys presents the origins of DNA fingerprinting through to the latest developments and their social impact
More details | Watch nowProducing Biogas and Identifying Bacteria
Bacteria which adhere to plants have ability to produce gases such as hydrogen, methane or ammonia. These are called biogas. Biogas is recognized as new and clean source of energy. I wanted to know what kind of bacteria produce biogas. I isolated bac....
More details | Watch nowYakushima Research Programe 2012
This research was carried out at the Yakushima island, in Kagoshima, Japan, in July 2012.We looked at Yakushima’s (wild) plants and sea turtles to compare with Yokohama’s (city). We did two researches there, Line transect and Vegetation. In the L....
More details | Watch nowCloning
Why is cloning such hot science? What are the potential benefits? And are there other ways of achieving them? What are stem cells, and why do many scientists say that embryonic cells are required for this work?
More details | Watch nowNobel Lives
An audience with Nobel prize winners John Sulston FRS and Sydney Brenner FRS, who talk to Sarah Montague of BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, about their lives in science and their visions for the future.
More details | Watch nowIs biodiversity going the way of the Dodo?
Panel discussion with Professor Jonathan Baillie, Dr William Cheung, Professor Adrian Lister and chaired by Dr Susan Lieberman, as part of the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2011. Right now one-fifth of the world’s vertebrates are classi....
More details | Watch nowNature’s glass: half-full or half-empty?
Andrew Balmford FRS is Professor of Conservation Science at University of Cambridge. The world’s governments failed to meet their pledge of reducing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010. Wild populations, their habitats, and the benefits they pr....
More details | Watch nowThe Zoological World of Edward Lear
Clemency Fisher is Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at National Museums Liverpool. Edward Lear is most famous for his Nonsense Rhymes, such as “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat”, but he was also a talented zoological art....
More details | Watch nowNerve tissue engineering
Research staff explain how they are developing nerve guidance channels for repairing peripheral nerve injury
More details | Watch nowFibroblasts and Oesophageal Cancer
Does the anatomical source of fibroblasts affect their behaviour within a 3D composite model of oesophageal adenocarcinoma invasion?
More details | Watch nowLighting up cells
A presentation about fluorescing cells by a Senior Lecturer in Bionanotechnology in the Department of Biomedical Science at the University of Sheffield
More details | Watch nowThe cuckoo egg mystery
Everything we touch is dirty!
Pandemic Influenza: one flu over the cuckoo’s nest
Where do the pandemic influenza viruses come from and why did experts fail to predict the severity of the 2009 pandemic? However to date, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza has been much less severe than the 1918 Spanish influenza.
More details | Watch nowCloning, stem cells and regenerative medicine
Extraordinary opportunities to study the molecular mechanisms that cause inherited diseases are being provided by new methods of producing stem cells. Hear about not only the potential value of these new methods, but also how their development was pr....
More details | Watch nowOur genomes, our history
Genetic differences between humans reflect the fundamental processes, such as mutation, recombination and natural selection, which have influenced our evolutionary history. Now that we can chart the genomes of many individuals, we are finding many su....
More details | Watch nowCape Gannets
Study on Cape Gannets, a new prey for quickly adapting Great White Pelicans on Malgas Island, South Africa. First observed in 2008. Result of indirect human involvement; Cape Gannets should be reconsidered for conservation management.
More details | Watch nowBody Fuel for Long Distances
In my geoset project I will be discussing the effects of nutrition in long distance endurance. Topics include saturating carbohydrate stores before a race, the Krebs (citric acid) cycle, the effects of dehydration and hyponatremia, and replenishing y....
More details | Watch nowMammalian biodiversity: past, present, future?
Beautiful and charismatic, mammals are biodiversity icons. But a quarter of mammalian species are now threatened with extinction, as ecosystems reel under the impact of a growing and ever more demanding human population. This lecture explores the his....
More details | Watch nowThree score years and then? The new biology of ageing
Ageing is the single greatest challenge facing our society today. Recent breakthroughs have demonstrated that it is possible to combine a long life with the absence of age-related disease. Scientists at the forefront of this research will explain the....
More details | Watch nowGenetic fingerprinting and beyond
Professor Jeffreys will describe how DNA typing can be used to solve casework and will review the latest developments, including the creation of major national DNA databases that are proving extraordinarily effective in the fight against crime.
More details | Watch nowThe Music of Life
This event at Sheffield University formed part of a series on Arts-Science Encounters. Stories from The Music of Life related by Denis Noble are interwoven with performances of relevant pieces of classical guitar music by the world-class performer, C....
More details | Watch nowThe great ideas of biology
Three of the ideas of biology are the gene theory, the theory of evolution by natural selection and the proposal that the cell is the fundamental unit of all life. A fourth idea is that the organization of chemistry within the cell provides explanati....
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