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

Creativity break: how do you apply creativity to biology? | High school biology | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

[Music] [Music]

One question that people ask me is, how do I apply creativity to the presentations that I give? My secret sauce is to come up with a visual image that anybody—I don't care if you're an adult, whether you're a fifth grader or second grader—that you can grasp that concept.

Here's my favorite one. Every single time you move your body, there's a whole bunch of neurochemicals that are released in your brain. You've heard of these neurochemicals: dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin. That's the fact. But the image that I give is that every single time you move your body, it's like giving your brain a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals that enrich your brain and change that neurochemical milieu. That is the image that everybody that comes to my talks leaves with, and it inspires them a little bit to move their body more.

So, can you come up with that image? That playful, fun, but factually accurate image that conveys your message? That will be your secret sauce too.

Have you heard that the bees aren't doing great? Well, I've been studying that and trying to understand how their complex health issues connect to a curious little parasite that’s in nearly every honeybee colony worldwide. It's called Varroa destructor, by the way.

Now, before I started this study, we thought that it was an open and shut case—that the parasite was sucking out the bee's blood, sort of like a tick on a puppy. But I thought something more strange might be going on. The damage that it caused just didn't seem like the damage that would be caused by blood removal.

The feeding process is super difficult to see though, so I had this idea. I fed different colored glowing food to the bees in their pollen and their sugar water to color their organs specific colors. Then, when the parasite fed on the bees, I could tell which organ it was eating based on which color was in its digestive system.

It turns out that they were eating the bee's liver, by the way, which is pretty weird. But this kind of work is actually pretty fun, and it was definitely a place where creativity was rewarded in biology.

More Articles

View All
The Jacobian matrix
In the last video, we were looking at this particular function. It’s a very non-linear function, and we were picturing it as a transformation that takes every point (x, y) in space to the point (x + sin(y), y + sin(x)). Moreover, we zoomed in on a specif…
Chris Hemsworth sends his best mates in search of the secret elixir of Bali | Azza & Zoc Do Earth
[cheering] - Hello. Chris Hemsworth here. I’ve decided to create a new series about unlocking health and wellness secrets around the world. Here’s the catch. [announcer] Chris Hemsworth! [Chris] I’m too busy to travel to all these countries and get the go…
How I spent $50,000 in South America - Not Forgotten SED 107
Hey it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So the purpose of this particular video is to convince you to click at the end of the video on one thing that will change a child’s life. If you’re an evil person and you want to do bad things to lit…
Top 10 Most Expensive Headphones In The World
Today we’re looking at the top 10 most expensive headphones in the world. Welcome to A Lux Calm, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired! Hey there, Alack Sirs, today is a great day to pump up the volume and listen up because we’re talki…
BlackRock: the Company That Controls* the World's Governments
You wake up to the sound of the alarm on your iPhone, and annoyed that you couldn’t get more sleep, you grudgingly unlock your phone to see what’s going on in the world. There’s an email from Amazon telling you that your package has been delivered, so you…
The Last Light Before Eternal Darkness – White Dwarfs & Black Dwarfs
Humans can survive in this universe as long as we have an energy source. Unfortunately, the universe will die. It will happen slowly, over many billions of years, but it will happen. On a universal time scale, stars like our sun will be gone in no time. …