Hank Green — It's The Small Things

My next series is going to be a synthesis series. I'm going to review anatomy, physiology, histology, cell and molecular biology, biochemistry, and the oxygen and carbon cycles in the world around us. It sounds like a lot, I know (trust me, I know - I'm the one writing it!) but my goal, by the time I'm done, is that you can follow your breath in and out of your body, and see all the amazing things it does along the way, and follow the same breath in and out of the world around you, which means we'll also review what happens to the food you eat. It turns out that we are all connected, you and I, to this planet we walk upon.

Now, I have a fat stack of text books beside me as I write this, all of which I will be using to assemble what I learned in my molecular biology degree into an easy-to-follow review of this complex, interwoven process. You don't want the same stack of books I have, and you don't want to do the reading. Let's be honest - I'm not sure I do, either. So after I gathered my stack of books, I turned to my favorite series on the internet to do a brief (ha!) review.

Crash Course was created by vlogbrothers John and Hank Green, and the series I'm linking to for this particular post is all hosted by Hank - he's the scientist in the family. In Crash Course Biology, he reviews the biological systems in the world around us. We may use much of this material for this synthesis (or putting together) of systems, but there's probably stuff I won't get into as much, like the comparative anatomy. When it comes to the anatomy, I'll lean on Crash Course Anatomy and Physiology. His Crash Course Chemistry will be good to understand some of the biochemistry involved (though he never directly reviews biochemistry), and Crash Course Ecology is almost certain to help tie the planet into this review of our systems.

I invite you to pick a series and dive in. While you're waiting for me to get things moving, this will help you have a better understanding, a better visualization, than you might currently have. And for those of you in biology programs, it might just help on those pesky finals...

NB: While Crash Course and SciShow both have Patreon pages to support them, this material is and always will be free to viewers. If you like it enough to support them, go for it (we do), but if you just can't, don't worry - it's still here for you to view! And no, I'm not getting paid for this endorsement - not that I'd object. ;)