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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.

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Alzheimer's and other brain diseases affect millions of people. Jeffrey Kordower and his colleagues are learning more about these neurodegenerative diseases so that we can try to treat them.

Building Your Own Ant Farm (Part 2 of 2). Ask A Biologist video with Dr. Biology and Rebecca Clark on how to build an ant farm with recycled CD cases. Watch part one.

Our biological sex determines a lot about the way our bodies look and function. But what determines our biological sex?
We study cooperation in humans a lot, but what about cooperation in... cancer? Learn how researchers are applying the same behavioral dilemmas experienced by people to the outcomes of cell cooperation.
Honey bees use a waggle dance to communicate the location, distance and quality of a flower to other bee workers. But what does this dance actually look like?

Love them or hate them, something is going on with male crickets on the island of Kauai. Once evenings filled with a chorus of these tiny singers has become strangely silent. Dr. Biology talks with biologist Marlene Zuk about how things are changing fast – maybe the fastest…

Take a breath and breathe out. What you just exhaled is the subject of this podcast. It is a story of over 140 thousand molecules and what we are learning about them and what a single breath might tell us about our health. Dr. Biology catches up with bioanalytical chemist …

In 1962 there was a popular Broadway musical called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. What does this have to do with a science podcast? The thought came up because of what happened at the conference today. And what was it? It was a dance performance. In fact, there were several…
A couple ants below some leaves

Ant Anatomy

Read Face to Face with Ants and then take this quiz to test your knowledge!

an example of a desert biome

Desert Biome

Read Delving into Deserts and then take this quiz to test your knowledge!

a cartoon of a lake

Freshwater Biome

Read Falling into Freshwater and then take this quiz to test your knowledge!

Bone Zoom Gallery (Up-close Inside Bones)

Take a look at the microscopic world of bone in our virtual bone histology lab. Just pick a microscope slide from below and click on it to view under the virtual microscope.

Pollen Gallery (Pollen up-close)

Pollen comes in many shapes and sizes. These are just a few of the thousands of examples.

Plankton Zoom Gallery (Plankton up-close)

Plankton comes in many shapes and sizes. These are just a few of the thousands of examples.

Feather Zoom Gallery (Feathers up-close)

There is nothing like seeing a feather up close.

Darwin and Mendel's Afternoon Tea

Darwin and Mendel's Afternoon Tea

An imaginary conversation between two great thinkers, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. While the monk, Mendel, had read Darwin’s publications - Mendel's work only came to be known later. We…

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Bee with mites

Mite Mighty Foe to 'Killer' Bees in State

Africanized "killer" bees have fallen prey to a deadly predator of their own- parasitic mites whose infestation has dropped their wild colony numbers by as much as 70 percent statewide.

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Microorganisms cartoon illustration

An Invisible Watery World

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…

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Endangered animal list

Making the List

By the time the first endangered species list was made, many species had already gone extinct.  Some species, like whooping cranes, were almost extinct at that time.  But the US…

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