yego.me
yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Welcome to high school biology | High school biology | Khan Academy

2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

It's very easy to take for granted some of the very amazing things that surround us. In particular, the notion of life on a day-to-day basis — we're used to it. We are living things; we see living things all around us, and we get preoccupied with other things. Things like doing our homework, paying our taxes, worrying about what our next meal is going to be.

But if you just take a moment, and I encourage you to actually take that moment right now, look in the mirror or look at me in this video. We are miraculous organisms in a miraculous biological system. Each of us is made of trillions, tens of trillions of living cells and bacteria that somehow organize together to create us in these incredibly elegant and complex systems.

How does that happen? How do you get intelligence? How do you get sensory perception? How do you pass on those traits from one generation to another? How do cells replenish themselves? What happens when there are mistakes? Are those mistakes or mutations sometimes a good thing, or are they always a bad thing?

How did life even emerge on, as far as we know, this planet? Maybe other planets — where do we get our energy from? It turns out the Sun. But then where do we get that energy from? Because we're not taking that solar energy directly. How do we get it from other things like plants, which are other forms of life? And how is all of this interconnected and related?

This is the focus of this high school biology course, and I just have to say, you know, it's hard. People always ask me, "What's your favorite topic, Sal?" And I'm not going to say it's hard to pick because it's like picking a favorite child. But if you don't stop and pause and think about the wonder of life around us, then it just makes life a lot less interesting.

And if you just pause for that moment, and especially if you start to understand, as you're going to do in this course, then I think you'll just have a little bit more wonder and a lot more understanding of how we fit in the universe.

Porcelain in the Wreckage | Drain the Oceans
15 Rules Of Building A Dream Team

More Articles

View All
Bobby Bones Descends a Slippery Cliff | Running Wild With Bear Grylls
[Wind rumbling] OK, so Bobby, where we’re heading is a 100 foot drop off that lip. We’re right on the edge of this, like, boulder, slab of rock that just curls away. And it’s one of these awkward ones because you can’t see over the lip. We’re going to go …
Deep Sea Exploration - 360 | Into Water
I have always been fascinated by the search for life. Aliens from outer space come to mind, but I’m inspired by animals in another final frontier: the ocean’s midwater, one of the least explored places on Earth, full of creatures that defy imagination. I…
How Do Billion Dollar Startups Start?
Every founder looks at Airbnb and just imagines Airbnb in the early days must have been something special. Actually, they kind of all look the same. For founders just starting out, they think that the trajectory and the growth graph of all the successful …
How to break social media addiction and actually start living
When you’re on the bus, waiting at the queue, or simply walking down the street, do you often find yourself taking up your phone? Constantly looking at your phone will prevent you from being aware of what’s happening around you, and this is not only physi…
Composite functions to model extraterrestrial skydiving
We’re told that Phlox is a skydiver on the planet Lernon. The function A of w is equal to 0.2 times w squared, which gives the area A in square meters under Flux’s parachute when it has a width of w meters. That makes sense. The function V of A is equal t…
Photography as Meditation | National Geographic
(serene music) [Kris] I always have a camera because I know that there’s going to be something there to photograph. The perfect shot for me, it comes out of nowhere. I want to see something that I haven’t seen before. That tree hasn’t been photographed t…