Basic Biology
clock | June 22, 2006Below the fold is the third report from Kevin. This time it really gets interesting, even fascinating! Hunting snakes, rural China, the people....Kevin has interesting observations about everything.
Since the way Kevin embeds pictures in MSWord makes it very tricky to extract them and still have them look decent, I urge you to go check out the photos he managed to upload onto Photobucket. Enjoy:
Xiagu report (she-ah-gu)
27 May
At first I was not near as impressed with Xiagu as I was with Jiuchong. It was much bigger and less personal. We arrived late afternoon on the 27th. Of course I…
clock | June 21, 2006Here is the first of Kevin's e-mailed reports from China, dated June 1-3, 2006. In it, you will be able to see pictures of some natural beauty he saw in China, then another kind of natural beauty he saw in China, then yet another kind of natural beauty he saw in China....
I love the way he writes - he should (will?) be a great blogger. What a combination of a travelogue, a personal diary, and lab notes of a research scientist - all in one, the three aspects of it connected seamlessly into a single narrative. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. So, without further ado, here is Kevin:…
clock | June 20, 2006Let's see how many people incapable of spelling 'plane' arrive here by the way of Google. But I am talking about a real 'plain' - a big one, in China, and about some very real live snakes as well!
A good friend (and ex-neighbor) of mine, Kevin Messenger, is in China right now, surveying herpetofauna (that is - reptiles and amphibians, for the non-biologists here) in a remote area of central China, rarely visited by Weesterners, and never before surveyed by scientists.
He is one of those natural-born herpetologists - he lives, breathes and dreams snakes. When I lived in Raleigh I would often…
clock | June 19, 2006 This is the first in a series of posts from Circadiana designed as ClockTutorials, covering the basics of the field of Chronobiology. It was first written on January 12, 2005:
There are traditionally three approaches to research and teaching of physiology: biochemical, energetic, and homeostatic. The three are by no means exclusive and all good physiologists will include all three in their work and teaching, but each with a different emphasis.
Biochemical approach is typical of human/medical physiology. Physiological mechanisms are described at lower and lower levels, until the molecules…
clock | June 16, 2006Last week we looked at the organ systems involved in regulation and control of body functions: the nervous, sensory, endocrine and circadian systems. This week, we will cover the organ systems that are regulated and controlled. Again, we will use the zebra-and-lion example to emphasize the way all organ systems work in concert to maintain the optimal internal conditions of the body:
So, if you are a zebra and you hear and see a lion approaching (sensory systems), the brain (nervous system) triggers a stress-response (endocrine system). This is likely to happen during the day, as the…
clock | June 16, 2006Animalcules 1.9, the carnival of microscopic life, is up on Aetiology. This is the first time I don't have anything there - just too swamped with everything. I promise I'll be good next time.
clock | June 16, 2006It is impossible to cover all organ systems in detail over the course of just two lectures. Thus, we will stick only to the basics. Still, I want to emphasize how much organ systems work together, in concert, to maintain the homeostasis (and rheostasis) of the body. I'd also like to emphasize how fuzzy are the boundaries between organ systems - many organs are, both anatomically and functionally, simultaneously parts of two or more organ systems. So, I will use an example you are familiar with from our study of animal behavior - stress response - to illustrate the unity of the well-…
clock | June 15, 2006This Monday night I taught lecture #7 of the 8-week Intro Biology course (adult education at a community college). First, I gave them their Exam #2 (on Diversity, see my lecture notes on those topics here, here and here). The flat distribution of the first exam has now turned bimodal: some students are making big improvements and I will probably end with a nice cluster of As and Bs, while other students are falling and may end up with a few Ds and Fs, with nobody left in-between.
Then, I continued with the physiology topics. The week before, I covered nervous, sensory, endocrine and…
clock | June 13, 2006SEED Magazine has an interesting article on the advances in avian transgenics....
I've been out of the loop for the past 3 or so years, but I took an Avian Biotechnology graduate class with Jim Petitte (mentioned in the article) a few years back, in which we did every step of the method separately, not really trying to make a transgenic chicken over a semester, but trying to figure out how to make each step work for us. The year I took it was the first time his class actually managed to produce a chimaera. Jim was so excited he was jumping up and down and hitting the ceiling - and he is a…
clock | June 13, 2006A few months ago I reviewed Joan Roughgarden's book "Evolutions Rainbow". Now that SEED magazine has published an interview with her, I thought about writing about it again (or just republishing the old one), but now I see that I do not have to, because PZ Myers did a much better job at it than I could ever dream of doing, so go and read it.
The only sentence I did not like was: "There are objections that this requires group selection, which always puts an idea on shaky ground...." As someone who has studied group selection (both biological and philosophical literature) intensely over the…
clock | June 11, 2006After three lectures on the basics, a long lecture on diversity, and a hard first exam, it is time to turn our attention to anatomy and physiology for the rest of the course:
Anatomy is the subdiscipline of biology that studies the structure of the body. It describes (and labels in Latin) the morphology of the body: shape, size, color and position of various body parts, with particular attention to the internal organs, as visible by the naked eye. Histology is a subset of anatomy that describes what can be seen only under the misroscope: how cells are organized into tissues and tissues into…