2016 Entries

How Does Cooperation Evolve?

Jonathan Perry (StatedClearly.com)

If evolution is all about “survival of the fittest”, how does cooperation evolve? Living things form cooperative relationships all the time. Research done by applying mathematics to biology is helping us understand the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation has caused some of the major evolutionary steps in the history of life, including the step from single celled creatures to multi-cellular plants and animals. See the paper this video based on here: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/

vimeo.com/168515600

 

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The Overflowing Drop

Pierluigi Colangeli, Ellen van Velzen, Christian Guill (University of Potsdam)

The video focuses on biodiversity of common, microscopical, yet absolutely interesting organisms. Beside their natural value, these creatures exert fundamental ecological services, of which, most of the time, we are unaware.

vimeo.com/168089931

 

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Beginning to Walk

Catherine Knier, Diepreet Saraina, Dima Jaber (Marquette University)

The unearthing of Tiktaalik was a major discovery for limb evolution. Studying the evolutionary development of Tiktaalik can give insights to the development of our own limbs.

vimeo.com/165491877

 

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Misconception: Mutations are Always Bad

Vickie Zhou, Hannah Varner, Soyoung Moon, Nina Kadich (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

A lot of people today think that mutations are always bad, but that’s not always the case.

vimeo.com/168175229

 

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Better Drugs Lead to Harder Sweeps in HIV-1

Alison Feder, Pleuni Pennings, Dmitri Petrov (for video), Bob Shafer, Soo-Yon Rhee, Susan Holmes (for research) (Stanford University)

This is a video abstract from a recent eLife paper: More effective drugs lead to harder selective sweeps in the evolution of drug resistance in HIV-1. In this video, we lay out the motivation and main results from the paper – the way in which drug resistance to HIV has evolved has changed fundamentally as our treatments have improved.

vimeo.com/167965201

 

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Pygids (2016 Video Contest Winner)

Matt Wilkins, Tyler Corey (University of Nebraska – Lincoln)

They’re not spiders! A music video about Amblypygids – a crazy group of Arachnids that evolved over 300 million years ago.

vimeo.com/168708641

 

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The Art of Speciation

Patrick Rahill (University of Notre Dame)

This video covers the two main types of speciation, allopatric and sympatric. It then describes current speciation research going on at the University of Notre Dame.

vimeo.com/168976836

https://vimeo.com/168976836

 

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Endosymbiosis: Living Cells Within Living Cells

Kurtis Baute (writer, producer, co-host), Tarsha Porter (co-host), Thomas Kelly (camera) (BrainBoostEducation.com)

Is it possible that we have ancient species living inside of our cells? This video offers a brief introduction to the strange and wonderful theory of endosymbiosis.

vimeo.com/168580935

https://vimeo.com/168580935

 

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Tree of Life

Sylvie Salamitou, Frédéric Hullin, Romuald Drot, Pierre Capy, Ronald Grandpey (Centre Nationnal de la Recherche Scientifique – CNRS)

The idea of this short film (about 30 seconds) is to tease the audience about a key idea in evolution science: The tree of life should not be depicted as a tree with a summit as usual but as a bush. All living beings evolved to the form they have today without stopping. There is no “living fossile”.

vimeo.com/153375611

 

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Can an Individual Evolve During a Single Lifespan?

Andrea Baldwin, Christine Chan, Maddie Houde, Diana Lopez (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Project for IB302 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in which students addressed a misconception in Evolution and why it is incorrect. Our group focused on whether an individual organism can evolve within a given lifespan, using the character Deadpool as a case study.

vimeo.com/164853761

 

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Ape (2016 Video Contest Runner-Up)

Eustace Ng, Anita Yen (Sheridan College)

This film is an attempt to show the order of change in this ape’s evolution.

vimeo.com/132998530

 

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The Tragedy of the Commons

Sally Le Page (University of Oxford)

What is the tragedy of the commons, and why is sex so tragic? In this video, I look at why animals don’t always seem to act in their own long term interest, and why I’m studying whether relatedness can stop fly sex from being such a tragedy.

vimeo.com/168817878

 

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The Evolution of the Caveman

Stephen Travers, Joe Linford, Ryan Laatz (Carrboro High School, Carrboro, NC)

Our video highlights all of the key evolutionary features that have evolved over the years to get us to cavemen.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4XBQUAJu24