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About QUEST A collaboration of six public broadcasters around the country, QUEST is a multimedia series that strives to deepen our understanding of some of today's most pressing sustainability topics through articles, videos, radio reports, television broadcasts, and educational materials.

10 min video on stem cells, used in U Rochester Med Center, Life Sciences Learning Center Stem Cell lesson

Millions of people suffer from asthma, a frightening disease that makes you feel like you're drowning. Using both mouse and human cells - and a humanized mouse to show how human type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2) work in the body, researchers at Janssen Research and Development, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School are figuring out ILC2's role in asthma. Their findings have important implications in the quest for effective asthma therapies!

How do we know what matter is made of? The quest for the atom has been a long one, beginning 2,400 years ago with the work of a Greek philosopher and later continued by a Quaker and a few Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Theresa Doud details the history of atomic theory.

Unexpected discoveries in the quest to cure an extraordinary skeletal condition show how medically relevant rare diseases can be.

The quest for artificial intelligence starts with Space Invaders. Researchers have created a new agent, capable of learning to play dozens of computer games from only minimal information. The work comes from inside the offices of mysterious Google-owned company DeepMind. Nature Video gets a rare glimpse inside.

Scientists said Wednesday a new drug tested on monkeys provided an astonishingly effective shield against an animal version of the AIDS virus, a major gain in the quest for an HIV vaccine. Macaque monkeys given the drug were able to fend off high, repeated doses of the simian version of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), they reported in the journal Nature.

This case study follows two beginning undergraduate researchers on a quest for a summer research project related to food web ecology. While writing their research proposal, the students receive feedback indicating that they have neglected an entire group of organisms from their food web-parasites, which leads them to a scientific research paper discussing how these organisms have been overlooked by scientists studying food webs, the challenges involved with including parasites in food webs, and the contributions parasites ultimately make to food webs. An integrated activity in which students visualize the food web using images of organisms and answer questions about species interactions provides opportunities to examine key concepts such as omnivory, ontogenetic diet changes, trophic levels, complex life cycles, and taxonomic aggregation. This case study was originally written for an undergraduate general ecology course, but could easily be adapted to undergraduate general biology courses covering community ecology or specific courses in invertebrate zoology, parasitology, or disease ecology. The teaching notes also discuss how the included code for R statistical computing software can be used to extend the case study in a more quantitative direction if desired.

JoAnn Burkholder and her associates at North Carolina State University were the pioneer investigators in the Pfiesteria research, which our group of Old Dominion colleagues has since pursued. Burkholder was the first scientist to link the 1991 fish deaths to Pfiesteria, based on her team's on-site investigations and controlled laboratory studies. In addition, she observed a complicated life cycle in the organism, including numerous morphological forms such as motile flagellated cells, amoebae and cysts that are able to survive in the sediment of estuaries until activated by the presence of fish to produce toxic motile cells.