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

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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.