207 results found for biology

Sir David Attenborough delivers the 2003 Michael Faraday Lecture entitled: Perception, deception and reality

An evolutionary development of perception is suggested - from passive reception to active perception to explicit conception - earlier stages being largely retained and incorporated in later species. A key is innate and then individually learned knowl....

Professor Hopper considers the vital role that the study of plant taxonomy and systematics has played in plant science. He considers, in particular, how these fields are transforming to meet the needs of 21st Century science as we address the challen....

Flowers are such a ubiquitous and familiar part of our modern world that it is easy to take them for granted. But as Darwin recognized, the exquisite details of their structure and appearance have been shaped by evolutionary processes over millions o....

Professor J.E.N Veron, the former Chief Scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science and widely regarded as the world's leading authority on coral reef ecosystems, presents the effects that climate change is having on coral reefs.

n this lecture, Eric R Kandel considers the neural systems and molecular mechanisms that contribute to learning and long-term memory and discusses how our insights into memory storage are allowing us to understand various forms of age related memory ....

Recent underwater images show that the deep sea realm of the British Isles is nothing like the monotonous expanse of mud that many people imagine. Spectacular coral reefs, once thought to be restricted to the tropics, are now known to occur in the ch....

Dr Adam Rutherford investigates the idea that the teaching of evolution is being threatened by a rise in creationism amongst religious students.nRutherford speaks to the former Director of Education at the Royal Society, Reverend Professor Michael Re....

The information for synthesizing the molecules that allow organisms to survive and replicate is encoded in genomic DNA. In the cell, DNA is copied to messenger RNA, and triplet codons in the messenger RNA are decoded in the process of translation to ....

Research into ageing has been rejuvenated by the discovery of mutations in single genes that extend the lifespan of laboratory animals. Some of the signalling pathways involved, particularly the insulin/Igf-like pathway, have effects on lifespan acro....

Our capacity for complex speech and language remains one of the most intriguing aspects of being human. It has long been suspected that some answers to this enigma will be found buried within the genome. With recent advances in genetic technologies, ....

Historically memory research has focussed on the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain's temporal lobes. Damage to the hippocampus is known to have a devastating impact on the ability to form new memories as well as compromising recollection of ....

Organisms of all kinds use signals comprising minute amounts of natural chemicals. The exploitation of semiochemicals is demonstrated with dramatic success in the management of pests and parasitic weeds in resource-poor East African cereal farming.

The normal proteins which circulate in human blood are either known or presumed to have beneficial functions. However normal immunity and inflammation proteins can cause or exacerbate disease in addition to helping to resist infections.

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our brain. Yet for each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is isolated and private. Despite centuries of research, language or gesture remains the only way we can disco....

British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough talks to Nature about his obsession with birds of paradise.

Scientist or Broadcaster?

Evidence of reproduction by internal fertilization has been discovered in a large group of ancient jawed fish. Embryos discovered within fossils of these animals confirm that live birth in prehistoric times was much more widespread than previously th....

The duck-billed platypus is a truly unique animal; a monotreme with almost no close relatives alive on earth. Scientists just had to take a look at that genome and here they discuss their findings.

The marine mammals known as cetaceans originated about 50 million years ago in south Asia, but their terrestrial ancestor is something of a mystery. Hans Thewissen and colleagues now provide the missing Eocene piece of the jigsaw.

Anjali Nayar visited a pioneering project in Madagascar that's aiming to protect one of the country's few remaining forests. It's hoped that projects like this will help curb global warming. But first, these projects must overcome the poverty and pol....

Venki Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 'studies of the structure and function of the ribosome', the cell's protein-making factory. In this interview, he talks about his surprise at winning the prize, and what it meant to....

British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough presents his views on Charles Darwin, natural selection, and how the Bible has put the natural world in peril in an exclusive interview for Nature Video.

D. Bruce Means gives a presentation of the ecological and biological diversity of the region around the Florida panhandle. Dr. Means gave particular attention to the unique climate and environment of the area. He lists the region as one of six biol....

Sheeva Yazdani presents on the biology of octopuses (octopi?) and recent developments in our understanding.

Branden Anglin presents on the development, treatment and possible future of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.

Vinnie LaBarbera presents on the role and species of beetles worldwide, including some slides of his own work at the FSU Biological Sciences Department.

A novel method of guiding nerve growth after accidents and traumas. Microscopic magnetic beads can be used to give direction to nerve re-growth.

Anti-cancer drug delivery with polymer bubbles.

A lecture given as part of the Origins 09 series at Florida State University to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'. Sean B. Carroll is a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin-M....

A lecture given as part of the Origins 09 series at Florida State University to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species'. Now in his 80th year, Alabama-born Edward Osborne (E.O.) Wilson has long enjoyed a reputation as ....

The concluding part of an interview with the 1962 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

An archive interview with the winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Biology operates at two levels: the large scale which we can see and the underlying microscopic one. The amazing way in which intermolecular forces cause protein arrays to self-assemble, enabling Nature to fabricate the large scale components of livi....

Susan Greenfield conducts us on an exhilarating tour of brain. A brief fascinating historical introduction is followed by a discussion on our present, admittedly limited, understanding of this amazing organ. Members of the group handle (and dissect) ....

Satellite, ship survey and computer modelling studies of the workings of the marine environment are used explore present fish supplies worldwide. The desperate need for global 'farming' strategies necessary to ensure that the Oceans can continue to p....

John Maynard Smith, one of our most eminent evolutionary biologists and scientific communicators originally trained as an engineer and spent the war years designing aircraft. He describes the way that flight developed in the animal kingdom. The fossi....

In this interview MacKinnon, Nobel Prizewinner in Chemistry, 2003, discusses Max Perutz and then his own research. He says his course into science was quite sequacious and he really didn't start science until he was about 30 as he had a strong intere....

Interview with the Nobel Prizwinner for Medicine,1974

This interview starts with Nirenberg (Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1968) giving his recollections of his school years. He remembers going down into some limestone caves in Florida at the age of 13-14. It was full of fossilized large animal bones. In fact....

There have been many arguments for and against GM Foods, but the question still stands - are they potential saviors of mankind or a disaster waiting to happen? This award winning video covers a range of important issues, discussed by scientists with ....

How long can we live, and how long do we want to live? Why do we change as we get old, and is there anything we can do to stop it? In this video the panel discuss ageing and some of the recent remarkable scientific advances that suggest ageing may no....

We can now expect to live longer than ever before, and if we get ill, we expect to be made better! However new threats continue to emerge.This presentation discusses tuberculosis and flu, new dangerous versions of old diseases, smoking and other life....

To what extent is our personality dictated by our genetic makeup? Groundbreaking new research in the fields of genetics and MRI Scanning are only now making it possible to tackle these questions, and the results are sometimes surprising. What makes u....

Have advances in modern medicine put an end to evolution in humans? If not, how is the human race evolving?

Fred Sanger is often considered the father of modern molecular biology, and is one of the few people to have been awarded two Nobel prizes. Working in Cambridge he developed a new chromatographic method for determining amino-acid end-groups. His n....

Video of John 'Kappa' Cornforth who was born in Australia, and has been profoundly deaf since his teens. He moved into the field of organic chemistry at Sydney University where he met his wife Rita. Together they moved to Oxford and had a profound in....

Günter Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine/ Physiology 1999 'for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell'. In this interview Blobel talks about the work that he did for t....