Join us for the opening of the 10th season of SciCafe! Museum astrophysicist Jackie Faherty discusses her current work visualizing and studying the universe using newly-released data from the Gaia catalog. In April, the Gaia space telescope released its second catalog of over 1.3 billion stellar distances, this unprecedented dataset is helping astronomers map the Milky Way like never before.
Doors open at 6:30pm.
Event details: https://bit.ly/2OwJN3r
This Trilobite Tuesday, watch or listen to Assistant Curator Melanie Hopkins explain where these diverse creatures fit into the fossil record across the globe, as well as delve into her research on trilobite growth patterns. Check out the latest episode of the Science@AMNH Podcast today!
How do trauma, poverty, and racial discrimination influence our health? What about our evolutionary history causes our bodies to respond in this way? Biological anthropologist Zaneta Thayer explores the biological mechanisms through which early life stress influences biology and health later on.
Slow lorises may look like big-eyed Ewoks, but their cute countenance has made these primates a target of the illegal wildlife trade. In this podcast, Mary Blair, primatologist and Director of Biodiversity Informatics Research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, discusses how research on these endangered animals can contribute to a better understanding of wildlife trafficking and the risk of zoonotic disease spread.
This lecture took place at the Museum on March 1, 2017.
Slow lorises may look like big-eyed Ewoks, but their cute countenance has made these primates a target of the illegal wildlife trade. In this SciCafe, Mary Blair, primatologist and Director of Biodiversity Informatics Research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, discusses how research on these endangered animals can contribute to a better understanding of wildlife trafficking and the risk of zoonotic disease spread. This lecture took place at the Museum on March 1, 2017. To learn about upcoming SciCafe events, visit amnh.org/scicafe. To listen to the full lecture, download the podcast: http://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blog...
Slow lorises may look like big-eyed Ewoks, but their cute countenance has made these primates a target of the illegal wildlife trade. Join Mary Blair, primatologist and Director of Biodiversity Informatics Research at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, as she discusses how research on these endangered animals can contribute to a better understanding of wildlife trafficking, including the risk of zoonotic disease spread.
Join Rockefeller University professor Leslie Vosshall as she demonstrates what is—and what will be—possible with CRISPR gene editing.
This lecture took place at the Museum on January 4, 2016. To watch a video version, visit the AMNH Youtube Channel, or the SciCafe section of AMNH.tv.
The SciCafe series is proudly sponsored by Judy and Josh Weston.
SciCafe: Modifying the Mosquito with CRISPR, and related activities are generously supported by the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Only a small percentage of people who try an illicit drug will go on to develop addiction. What makes one more vulnerable to addiction than another? Theories abound, from troubled childhoods to work stress to genetics. Psychiatrist Edmund Griffin explains how epidemiology, cocaine-addicted rats, and molecular neuroscience all help to shed light on one of society’s most troubling questions: Why is it that some people just can’t get enough?
Only a small percentage of people who try an illicit drug will go on to develop addiction. What makes one more vulnerable to addiction than another? Theories abound, from troubled childhoods to work stress to genetics. In this podcast, psychiatrist Edmund Griffin explains how epidemiology, cocaine-addicted rats, and molecular neuroscience all help to shed light on the question.
Evolutionary biologists argue that no study of human health or evolution is complete without considering the trillions of microbes that live in us or on us—our microbiome. In this SciCafe, join molecular anthropologist Christina Warinner as she explores how scientists are reconstructing the ancestral human microbiome to better understand the lives and health of our ancestors.
Anemones look like beautiful flowers in the sea, but did you know that they are actually animals related to jellyfish and corals? In this podcast, join Estefanía Rodríguez, associate curator in the Museum's division of Invertebrate Zoology, for an exciting underwater journey to meet sea anemones, and learn about how much more there is still to be discovered about these marine marvels.
This lecture took place at the Museum on January 6, 2016.
Hey, Teens! Ever wonder how open heart surgery actually works? Want to know more about the miraculous muscle that is the human heart? Want to know what stem cell research is actually used for? Join researcher Jeffrey Karp at a free lecture as he talks about how doctors repair damaged cardiac tissue with new biologically inspired glue that can be used to mend a broken heart, literally. Learn more and register.
Americans spend an estimated 92% of their time indoors, yet we know little about the diversity of microbes that exist in the built environment. This collection of microbes is influenced by where we live, whom we live with, and what we do, but it also can have an effect on us and our health.
In this SciCafe, geneticist Jack Gilbert presents the most exciting and recent discoveries from this invisible world. Download this lecture as a podcast.
Typically the first question asked of new parents is, "Is it a boy or a girl?" But what is the brain biology behind sexual differences? Join Bridget Nugent, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania, to learn about how sex differences are created in the brain.
Download this podcast or watch the video below:
Walking on two legs, or "bipedalism," is a key characteristic defining humans and our early ancestors. But what an odd way to walk and run!
Join Museum Curator Brian Richmond and Boston University anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva in exploring the great advantages of walking on two legs, as well as the unfortunate consequences of evolving bipedalism from a body plan designed to walk on four, not two, legs.
This Wednesday, genetics researcher Tuuli Lappalainen speaks about her work on gene expression and regulation at the Museum’s SciCafe: “Flipping the Genetic Switch: Discovering the ‘Rules’ of Human Variation.” Dr. Lappalainen, a researcher at the New York Genome Center and assistant professor at Columbia University, will discuss how different genes are turned “on” or “off” their activity levels help to explain variation in human beings as well as their risk for various diseases. We asked her a few questions about her area of expertise:
The human genome has been sequenced for more than a decade now, so what are the new big questions facing the field of genetics?
The biggest questions are how does the genome function to give rise to living individuals and also how does it result in individuals with different physical characteristics, disease risks, and other variations.
You mentioned disease risk. What are some of the diseases that are associated with genetic regulation, in other words, how high or low a gene is tuned?
A lot of common complex diseases are associated with genetic markers, from cardiovascular disease to schizophrenia. In all of those diseases, research shows us that genetic regulation is a factor.
What are some reasons the same gene might work differently in different people?
Variation is pervasive in the genome, and almost all genes have a regulator gene that controls how active they are. We’ve gotten really good at finding these regulators and variations, which means we have a huge haystack of things to sort through as we work to find things that are connected to disease risk.
In the fall of 2014, a team of vertebrate specialists from the Museum headed to one of the most remote areas in the world in search of new species and specimens on the Explore21 Papua New Guinea expedition. In this SciCafe, Brett Benz, Paul Sweet, and Christopher Raxworthy talk about the discoveries they made, as well as the adventures they had along the way.
Download this lecture as a podcast, and read field posts from this expedition.
