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Welcome to Ask A Biologist. This site has a large collection of biology learning materials that includes stories, games, activities, videos, and a podcast.
Reading a scientific article can seem like a difficult task. To help get you started, we first discuss what all goes into a scientific article. Then, when you're ready, click on Article Dissection to see how a scientific article can be broken down into parts that are a bit easier to…
Looking into the past can be strange and exciting. To understand a past that goes back millions of years, we often depend on the stories told by fossils. Dr. Biology talks with anthropologist Donald Johanson about Lucy, a fossil of human ancestors that has taught us some…
Coral reefs may look like colorful rocks, but they’re living animals that support entire ocean ecosystems. In this episode, Dr. Biology chats with professor Liza Roger, whose lab at Arizona at Arizona State University is home to corals, sea anemones, and some unusual upside-down jellyfish. Together…
When you visit a pond or the beach, what kinds of living things do you see in the water? Depending on the environment, you might find fish, frogs, crabs, insects, seaweed, or lily pads. Don’t let your eyes fool you, though… there’s a hidden world in water full of creatures too small to be…
Dr. Biology interviews research scientist Kate Ihle at Barro Colorado Island in Panama. BCI is part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
The race is on. It is one where biologists and citizen scientists are working as quickly as possible to find and identify all the species on Earth before some go extinct. It might not seem like an important race, but we learn from entomologist Kelly Miller that not knowing what…
Television portrays the lives and work of forensic artists, but what is it like to really be a forensic artist? Are the tools you see on the big and little screen really used by the people who recreate the face of someone when there might only be a skull or parts of a scull to use as a starting…
No, this episode is not about the rock band or the cute German car that people love. This show is about some curious insects that have very different relationships with ants. To be exact, this is about three species of beetles that either battle ants, live close by an ant colony, or in one case…
Beetle Dissection
The outside of beetles can be shiny, dull, or extremely colorful. But what is going on inside of beetles…
Nano Building
Play the Bionanoengineering Game
Basic building patterns can be used to think about how technologies are built at the nano-scale. Try your hand…
Doctor Know
Play doctor in the 21st century! Practice modern medicine by examining all dimensions of the body, from organs to molecules, as…
Venom!
The shape of a molecule is very important. It’s what makes it possible for proteins to interact with other parts of the cell. In…
Bee Learning Lab
Take a trip with us today into the Bee Learning Lab. Train bees in your very own experiment and see how you can make them learn…