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The lab includes a number of short videos explaining aspects of research methods or relating the evolutionary history of stickleback fish. We recommend that you view these videos, especially when going through the lab for the first time. Throughout the lab, bolded words in the text are defined in the glossary under the "Reference" tab.

2 minute animation (images with text) describing how phylogenetics was used to identify likely placental mammal ancestor.

Ability to read and comprehend complex text, while taking concise notes that reflect this comprehension

Text and interactives on human evolution and genetic structure

Embryo Images Normal and Abnormal Mammalian Development is a tutorial that uses scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) as the primary resource to teach mammalian embryology. The 3-D like quality of the micrographs coupled with selected line drawings and minimal text allow relatively easy understanding of the complex morphological changes that occur in utero. Because early human embryos are not readily available and because embryogenesis is very similar across mammalian species, the majority of micrographs that are utilized in this tutorial are of mouse embryos. The remainder are human.

TED-Ed with supporting lesson materials through cpalms.org resource site.  Text links include cell cycle, immune system response to cancer, and Laron's syndrome dwarfism which has low incidences of cancer and diabetes.

10:47 animation with text

Learn to use Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man®, or OMIM®, a catalog of human genes and genetic conditions. OMIM is a foundational resource in genomics and is valuable for clinicians and biomedical researchers. OMIM links and data are found at sites all around the bioinformatics sphere, but understanding the full scope of OMIM's data and resources enable the most comprehensive understanding of human phenotypes and disease. OMIM contains full-text summaries of information from the scientific literature, and provides extensive links to the literature resources and other genomic resource tools as well. Use OMIM as a comprehensive first stop to find important information and gene links for human Mendelian disorders.

Common Core Standards for Science and Technical Subjects focus mainly literacy.   Teachers of science are expected to promote skills in students that allow them to read technical nonfiction texts.  Reading standards can be summarized as follows:

Review text for biomolecules

Whether you call it textspeak, techspeak, or a reason for Shakespeare to spin madly in his grave, technology is impacting the way we think, connect, and communicate.

We see color because of specialized light-sensing cells in our eyes called cones. One type, L-cones, sees the reds of strawberries and fire trucks; M-cones detect green leaves, and S-cones let us know the sky is blue. But vision scientists have now discovered that not all cones sense color (see video).

research summaries

Adam Ruben's tongue-in-cheek column about the common difficulties and frustrations of reading a scientific paper broadly resonated among Science Careers readers. Many of you have come to us asking for more (and more serious) advice on how to make sense of the scientific literature, so we've asked a dozen scientists at different career stages and in a broad range of fields to tell us how they do it. Although it is clear that reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience, the stumbling blocks are real, and it is up to each scientist to identify and apply the techniques that work best for them. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Researchers have long known that women whose families include fraternal twins are more likely to give birth to twins themselves, and they're finally starting to figure out why. After scanning data from nearly 2000 mothers of fraternal twins, scientists from eight countries found two genes that increase a woman's chance of having twins-one that affects hormone levels and another that may alter how ovaries respond to them. The second of these may also have implications for why some women respond better than others to in vitro fertilization.

After the third time he nearly died but before the fourth, David Fajgenbaum embraced a new motto: Think it, do it. "I got out of the hospital with this profound sense of, you need to make the most of every second," he says. A former college football player with close-cropped dark hair and a firm handshake, Fajgenbaum, 31, is the picture of youthful vigor now. But that belies a frightening reality. Tomorrow the symptoms with which he's all too familiar could return, sending him to the intensive care unit (ICU) with every organ failing. 

A deadly disease known as African sleeping sickness has puzzled doctors for decades. It would disappear from villages without a trace, only to re-emerge weeks or months later with no known cause. Frustrated health officials wondered how sleeping sickness could persist when not a single villager or animal-the disease's only carriers-tested positive for the insect-borne parasite that causes it. Now, scientists may have an answer at last: They've discovered the disease was hiding in plain sight this whole time, living in and even transmitting via human skin.

Researchers have now created the first molecules of RNA, DNA's singled-stranded relative, that are capable of copying almost any other RNAs. The discovery bolsters the widely held view among researchers who study the origin of life that RNA likely preceded DNA as the central genetic storehouse of information in the earliest cells some 4 billion years ago.

At first, the researchers assumed that genes would shut down shortly after death, like the parts of a car that has run out of gas. What they found instead was that hundreds of genes ramped up. Although most of these genes upped their activity in the first 24 hours after the animals expired and then tapered off, in the fish some genes remained active 4 days after death.

Sometimes, a genetic tweak can make a really big difference in an animal's appearance. That's what likely happened when the predecessors of modern snakes lost their legs, a process that started some 150 million years ago, two separate groups of scientists have discovered. Although the teams took very different approaches to solve the mystery of how those limbs vanished, both came up with similar results: Mutations in DNA located near a gene key to limb formation keep that gene from ever turning on, they report today.