Robert Sandler tells the story of doliolid reproduction. The video was made with paper puppets and hand-drawn animations. Robert made this episode with support from the Society of Royce Fellows.
Connor McGuigan, an invertebrate zoology student, describes Astrammina rara: a giant, carnivorous cell that lives in Antarctic waters. This foraminiferan is a unicellular organism that can capture and eat animals much larger than it.
Riley Thompson, from the College of the Atlantic, tells the story of how animals become invisible.
In this video, Trisha Towanda talks about one particular jellyfish, the fried egg jelly, and some of the other creatures that hang around it. There are moon jellies that the fried egg jelly eats. These moon jellies have little parasitic crustaceans on them called amphipods, which jump to the fried egg jelly while the moon jelly is being eaten. There are also crabs that ride around on the fried egg jelly, that are parasitic in their youth, but then grow to be helpful symbionts by eating off the little amphipods. This sort of coming of age story, where a symbiont’s relationship changes over its lifespan is an unusual one. Trisha put the pieces together by staring at them for hours and days and weeks when she was in Erik Thuessen‘s lab at Evergreen State College.
If you are stuck to a rock it is tricky to get close enough to a partner to mate. One solution to this problem would be to release eggs or sperm into the open water, which is what many animals in this situation do. Acorn barnacles (Semibalanus balanoides), however, found a different solution. They have evolved the longest penis relative to their body size of any animal. In this video the penises of several barnacles are probing the neighborhood for mates. The penis is re-grown each mating season.
Sophia Tintori and Cassandra Extavour talk about the evolution and development of multicellular organisms, and in particular the specialization of reproductive cells.
Riley Thompson made this animation about the fascinating lifecycle of narco babies. We usually don’t think of babies that grow inside their mothers as parasites, but sometimes the lines get very blurry. This is especially true in Narcomedusae, a group of poorly known jellyfish found throughout the world’s oceans.
Robert Sandler tells the story of ocean slime, using stop motion and jellyfish puppets. Robert made this episode with support from the Society of Royce Fellows.
This video demonstrates some of the features of PhyloTree. It then shows the early explosive discovery of mammal species (most major mammal groups were discovered early on), and then shows the slow and steady discovery of cnidarians (many cnidarians remain to be described). The tool can also be used to quickly find the first species that was described in a group. The first siphonophore to be described, for example, was Physalia physalis (the Portuguese man o’ war).
JD Laurence-Chasen, an invertebrate zoology student, explains how to read phylogenies.
Alysse Austin, a student in Casey Dunn’s Invertebrate Zoology course at Brown University, describes sexual dimorphism in green spoonworm.
Here is a semi-interactive video (with the option of a single, non-interactive video here) from CreatureCast alum Sophia Tintori, featuring tips from a handful of ocean-dwellers that each have drastically different approaches to being invisible.
In this first video, Alison Sweeney talks about work that has been done in the Morse lab on Squid iridescence.
This course introduces cryptography by addressing topics such as ciphers that were used before World War II, block cipher algorithms, the advanced encryption standard for a symmetric-key encryption adopted by the U.S. government, MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions, and the message authentication code. The course will focus on public key cryptography (as exemplified by the RSA algorithm), elliptic curves, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The course concludes with key exchange methods, study signature schemes, and discussion of public key infrastructure. Note: It is strongly recommended that you complete an abstract algebra course (such as the Saylor FoundationĺÎĺ_ĺĚĺ_s MA231) before taking this course. Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: explain how symmetric and asymmetric key ciphers work; list and define cryptographyĺÎĺ_ĺĚĺ_s goals; list and define the most common classical ciphers; explain the workings of mechanical ciphers Enigma and Lorenz; describe the principles of substitution-permutation networks; describe the algorithms for data encryption and the advanced encryption standard; describe and use the MD5 and SHA-1 hash functions; explain the idea behind public key cryptography; use the RSA cryptography system by applying it to practical problems; test whether the large integer is prime with the mathematical tools presented in this course; define the elliptic curve and use it in cryptography; explain the Diffie-Hellman key exchange; describe the most common signature and autokey identity schemes; describe the conceptual workings of public key infrastructure. This free course may be completed online at any time. (Computer Science 409)
In this video segment from Nature, crabs face numerous obstacles in their migration from their forest home to the Caribbean Sea.
Describes a simple business, leading to a discussion on inflation/deflation. It also touches on income statements. [Economics playlist: Lesson 1 of 20]
Continues the description of the cupcake business, inflation/deflation, and the income statement. [Economics playlist: Lesson 2 of 20]
Uses a spreadsheet to show why prices decrease when utiliation is low and why prices increase when utilization is high. [Economics playlist: Lesson 3 of 20]
Botanists and biologists work to create a DNA barcode library for plant life in this video segment from New York Voices.
Learn about the Dance Theatre of Harlem is this segment from A Walk Through Harlem.