Climate challenge bbc game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/climate_challenge/aboutgame.shtml

 The future is in your hands! Your are presidente of European Nations and must tackle global climate change from 2000 to 2100.

Press the green play button to advance one, ten-year turn in the game.

Let's go to the Natural History Museum!

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/evolution/index.html

                     

Evolution.It is generally accepted that the astonishing diversity of life on our planet is the result of a process called evolution, which drives organisms to change gradually over time. While the basic concept of organisms evolving is not a difficult one, understanding how evolution works, and how evolutionary theory was developed, is more complex.

 

 Darwin's first sketch of the tree of life, found in one of his notebooks from 1837. Image reproduced by kind permission of the syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Interactive Tree of Life:The Tree of Life shows how all the species on Earth are related to each other and that they have all descended from the same common ancestor.

Charles Darwin first thought of the concept of the Tree of Life in the 19th century and new species are being discovered, described and added all the time.
On the tree below* you will find a small selection of Earth's species, including us, Homo sapiens, and our extinct early human relative, Australopithecus afarensis. Select any two to find out how they are related to each other.
* http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/evolution/tree-of-life/interactive-tree/index.html

EVOLUTION Darwin

.....

 Evolution is the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.

 http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/science-of-natural-history/biographies/charles-darwin/
 In 1836 Charles Darwin returned home. He returned to England after five years travelling arround the world, taking as many samples as he could. In his travel, he could notice that there were many types of species. He specially observed the tortoises when he was in the Galapagous, each one with different characteristics. You could see that there were tortoise at first sight, but they were different in some way, for example in the neck. Nothing he investigated during his travel matched together to obtend somthing clear. All was mixed up.
While Darwin was in South America, a man called Charles Lyell wrote a book where he sugested that continents move and originally all continents were together in a big one called Pangea. This theory helped Darwin in his deduction, but it wasn’t the only one. Darwin tried to put that puzzle together:

• Fossils were one of the proves that things had changed. They were similar to nowadays species, but not the same. Evidence of fossils gave support to Darwin’s posterior theory.
• In his travel he discovered the enormous diversity of species, and because of so, they can’t all been spontaneously generated. He realised that specied had to develope according to the enviroment.
• Artificial selection was used since very long time in farming. He started to link how humans select animals to how species change.
• Thumas Malthus wrote an essay called “Principles of population”. That made Darwin to put all the pieces of his puzzle together. Without deaths the world would be overpopulated. Darwin realised that there is always something that prevent overpopulation in species. The big question was, How and Why will they die to prevent overpopulation?

Finally he got the answer. He arrived to this conclusions:

• Species change, and this changes take a long time to occur.
• Because of sepecies change, the number of species will increase.
• As species increase, they all come from a common ancestor.
• The survivers of all this species will emerge because of NATURAL SELECTION.

“Individuals that are borned with better adaptations will be the ones who will survive”.

 This picture it shows how different species come from a common ancestor.

Questions:

1. What is Pangea?

2. What was the essay, that Darwin read related to population, about? 

3. When talking about adaptation, what species will survive?

4. How did Darwin explained that natural selection take place?




MOVIE WORKSHEET

 Name:__________________

Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life

1. What did most of Europe believe for about 2000 years about the origin of species?

2. What was the name of the ship Darwin sailed around the world in?

3. What is significant about the shapes of the tortoise shells in the Galapagos islands?

4. Who did Darwin send his specimens to, back in England?

5. What did Darwin call the process by which species change?

6. How is dog breeding similar to natural selection?

7. What did Alfred Russel Wallace send Darwin in the mail?

8. What was the name of Darwin’s book?

9. What did people find scandalous about Darwin’s book?

10. What can we deduce about a fossil found in sedimentary rock?

11. What fossil that Richard Owen purchased, supported Darwin’s theory?

12. How does the Hoatzin support Darwin’s theory?

13. What does the platypus do that almost every other mammal does not?

14. How did a bishop calculate the age of the earth?

15. How does radio dating work?

16. What is responsible for the distribution of similar species across the globe?

17. How did the eye evolve?

Name:____________________

 

Movie worksheet: Charles Darwin: Species Evolution

1. How did people of the 19^th century (and some still today) believe our world came to be?

2. What did Charles Darwin find that made him wonder about the differences between life long ago and today?

3. What are the bones of prehistoric animals called?

4. What were some of the differences and similarities that Darwin observed on his 5 year voyage?

5. How did he explain the many differences between the many finches, lizards, and turtles in the Galapagos Islands?

6. What did Darwin call his theory?

7. Why is it so difficult to observe evolutionary change during your lifetime?

APE TO MAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TT3aRU-VnQ

Scientists from the mid-nineteenth century have searched for the fossil remains of the "missing link" in evolution - the half-man, half-ape that would explain where mankind came from. But over the last century and a half, it has been the idea of what a missing link is that has evolved. The history of this scientific quest - peopled with fanatics, frauds, amateurs, professionals, the lucky, the unlucky, the unfairly neglected and the undeservedly praised - is the subject of this documentary. 
 _______________________________________________________________________________________

Human evolution

 

Skull reconstructions of 3 human species: Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens

 We humans have been so successful in spreading across the world and changing our habitat to suit ourselves that it is sometimes easy to forget that we are animals too. But how did we separate from the other great apes, and where did modern humans first evolve?
Find out the answers to these intriguing questions and much more.... in this link:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/human-origins/index.html

Video Guide: “Walking with Cavemen”

Directions:  Answer the questions below using information found in the video.

http://watchdocumentary.org/watch/walking-with-cavemen-episode-1-first-ancestors-video_3fb53a73a.html 

1. To what group of primates do humans belong to? ___________________

2. How long have humans and their ancestors been present on Earth? ____________________

3. When did Homo sapiens first evolve? _______________________

4. When did the early hominid called “Lucy” live? ___________________

5. What was different about A. afarensis from other earlier primates? _________________________

6. What does Australopithecus mean? ______________________________

7. What caused the change from jungle to grasslands to occur in Africa? ______________________________

8. What helped to drive the evolution of larger brain size in Australopithecines? _____________________________________________

9. What changes in Lucy allowed her to walk more like a human than an ape? _________________________________________________________

10. Fossils tell us about physical changes – how can we determine how Lucy and other Australopithecines behaved? ______________________________

11. What are the advantages of bipedalism (walking upright)? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

12. When did P. boisei live? ____________________

13. What do teeth fossils tell us about the diet of P. boisei? _____________________________________________________________

14. Why were P. boisei considered specialists? _____________________________________________________________

15. What was the probable cause of the extinction of the P. boisei?

16. What was the first hominid to carry the genus name Homo? ________________________

17. How much bigger was Homo habilis brains than P. boisei? ___________________ What does Homo habilis mean? _________________________________

18. What did H. habilis make that earlier hominids did not? _____________

19. What does Homo ergaster mean? When did they first evolve? ____________________________________________________________

20. What changes can be seen in the bones of this hominid? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

21. What adaptations to the hot environment have appeared in Homo ergaster? _____________________________________________________

22. What new tool has H. ergaster created that helped them modify their environment? _____________________________

23. What does Homo erectus mean? When did they first evolve? ____________________________________________________________

24. What may have allowed H. erectus to be able to move around and travel so far? _______________________________________________________

25. What did H. erectus learn to make tools from? _____________________

26. When did Homo erectus go extinct? _________________________

27. Did modern humans evolve from H. erectus or H. ergaster? __________________________

28. Why did Homo ergaster go extinct? (Alec Baldwin talks about this…) _____________________________________________________________

29. Why was the use of fire by hominids so important to human brain evolution? ___________________________________________________

30. What hominid had a brain almost as big as ours? _______________________________________

31. What was a difference in behavior between H. heidelbergensis and modern humans? _______________________________________________

32. What climate changes occurred in Africa and Europe that affected the evolution of Homo heidelbergensis? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

33. What hominid evolved from H. heidelbergensis in Europe? _______________________________________

34. What adaptations to the cold climate do H. neanderthalensis have? __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

35. When did H. neanderthalensis go extinct? ______________________

36. What does Homo sapiens mean? ________________________________

37. When did the first H. sapiens evolve? ____________________________

38. What adaptations to heat did H. sapiens have? _____________________________________________________________

39. When did Homo sapiens move out of Africa and begin to spread across Asia and Europe? ___________________________

40. What does the narrator say is the most important aspect to human brain evolution (and allowed modern humans to evolve and survive)? _________________________________

Our planet: The Earth.

 Yuo will find information in this link:

http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=1077258

Noise pollution.

Noise pollution is generated by excessive sound (loud and/or lasting) or is sound made in the wrong place.
The noise can have negative effects on health, for example insommnia, deafness, and mental deterioration. It can lead to a number of diseases as the inmune system weakens.


Dangerous decibels: How loud is too loud? Play and learn!
http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/virtualexhibit/index.html


Check your hearing:
http://www.betterhearing.org/check-your-hearing

Science in Al-Andalus.

 http://youtu.be/JZDe9DCx7Wk

1001 Inventions is an award-winning international educational organisation dedicated to the history of science and technology in Muslim civilitation during the period known as the Golden Age. The organisation encompasses online and traditional publishing, films, and both static and  travelling exhibitions. The 1001 Inventions organisation involves contributions from more than one hundred academics. The organisation has a global fanbase of more than 70 million and more than three million people have visited the 1001 Inventions exhibitions.