Courses tagged with "Nutrition" (287)

Botany is the study of plants.  Because species in the plant kingdom have characteristics that make them distinct from any other form of life, they are particularly interesting subjects for the study of evolution and physiology.  For example, whereas most organisms are dependent on other organisms for energy, plants can capture energy directly from photons of light and convert it into a usable form through the process of photosynthesis.  For this reason, plants are referred to as the “producers” in a habitat.  Unlike the cells of other organisms, plant cells have rigid cell walls constructed from the inside out (rather than the outside in) during mitosis and cytokinesis.  Plants also have a variety of unique reproductive and dispersal mechanisms that allow them to quickly adapt to, occupy, and invade far-flung areas, despite their general immobility. In this course, you will learn the basics of plant biology.  We will begin with plant anatomy, learning the names and functions of all of the parts o…

Even in ancient times, scholars believed that diseases could be spread by organisms too small to be seen by the naked eye. Before we discovered that bacteria cells were the real culprits, many attributed disease to other sources. Now that scientists have definitively identified the microscopic causes of various infectious diseases, microbiology, or the study of microscopic-sized organisms, has become an increasingly important field in biology and in the larger biomedical community. Most microbes are harmless. Some of them are essential for life on Earth, e.g. through their ability to fix nitrogen. Biotechnology, which is truly the industry of our times, takes advantage of microbes for the production of a variety of complex substances, and it also mass-produces natural and engineered microbes for human use. This course will cover a range of diverse areas of microbiology, including virology, bacteriology, and applied microbiology. This course will focus on the medical aspects of microbiology, as medical res…

Marine Biology is the study of ocean life.  As you might expect, life in salt water is vastly different from life in a terrestrial or freshwater environment due to factors like salinity, water circulation, and atmospheric pressure.  How, for example, can organisms living in salt water avoid dehydration?  How do organisms living in the depths of the ocean handle the immense pressure?  How do the environmental factors in marine communities affect biodiversity?  How do some animals manage to alternate between the demands of terrestrial life and the demands of marine life?  In this course, you will learn the answers to these questions and more.  This course will touch on a number of different subfields of biological study (including biochemistry, physiology, zoology, botany, and ecology) within the context of the ocean environment. You will start by learning about the ocean itself and its physical properties, as these properties influence the abundance, distribution, diversity, physiology, and behavior o…

Zoology is the scientific study of diversity of animal life, classification, physiology, behavior, and evolution. Unicellular organisms have evolved into complex multicellular forms. Organisms, both unicellular and multicellular, in various complex shapes and sizes are found in almost every habitat and environment. The field of zoology includes many subfields of biology as well as a vast diversity of unicellular and multicellular organisms. Animals first appeared in the fossil record an estimated 600 million years ago as multicellular protozoa. Over the next 70 million years, they radiated into an incredible number of different invertebrate phyla (which represent the majority of animal groups and species), and in the next 150 million years, vertebrate and invertebrate species began to colonize the land. Though the history of animals is extensive and the fossil record at times is conflicted and vague, understanding the historical connections between animals is important in order to understand modern-day rela…

Learn about the impact of infectious disease on sustainable animal-based food production by understanding the science of growth, immunity, and infection and by learning the problem-solving skills needed to advance animal health and food production through optimal management practices.

This is a course about addiction to drugs and other behaviors. It will describe what happens in the brain and how this information helps us deal with and overcome addiction. It will also discuss other topics such as government policy and our vulnerability to take drugs.

This course is about how the brain creates our sense of spatial location from a variety of sensory and motor sources, and how this spatial sense in turn shapes our cognitive abilities. ***April 2016 Update: The course materials can be accessed by selecting the "September 1 2015" session from the "Sessions" menu.***

This course will take students on an extraordinary journey – the beginning of a massive transformation of humankind. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened in the billions of years of evolution on Earth. It was enabled by technology, but many other factors were part of its driving force.

Developmental biology asks questions about how organisms come into being, how life forms, and how complex structures develop and are differentiated.  These fundamental questions have been the subject of research for centuries; accordingly, this course you will teach you not only about the beginnings of organisms, but about the beginnings of developmental biology as a science.  Currently, developmental biologists use a range of tools and research focifrom molecular techniques to surgical manipulations to chemical and environmental studiesto answer these questions.  Their approaches are multi-faceted because developmental biology itself addresses topics of importance to a wide range of fields, from molecular biology to neuroscience to evolutionary biology. In this course, you will learn about the field of developmental biology from its origins to the present day.  We will take a look at historical experiments as well as modern techniques and the mechanisms of development.  You will follow a variety of me…

Molecular biology studies the molecular mechanisms of life, particularly those responsible for genes and their expression.  In the center of molecular biology are the nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, and how they contribute to the synthesis of proteins. After a historical introduction (Unit 1), this course describes the basic types of DNA and RNA structure and the molecular interactions that shape them (Unit 2).  Unit 3 describes how DNA is packaged within the cellular nucleus as chromosomes; in eukaryotes the DNA coils around histones to form nucleosomes that comprise the chromatin of the chromosomes.  The next three units describe the core processes of molecular biology: replication of DNA (Unit 4), transcription of DNA into messenger RNA (Unit 5), and translation of messenger RNA into a protein (Unit 6).  These are followed by modifications of these basic processes: regulation of gene expression (Unit 7), DNA mutation and repair (Unit 8), and DNA recombination and transposition (Unit 9). The course conclu…

One of the best ways to understand the present is to understand the past. Evolutionary Biology is the study of the changes in life forms over time - changes that have occurred over millions of years as well as those that have occurred over just a few decades. In this course, we will look at the various mechanisms of evolution, how these mechanisms work, and how change is measured. The concepts you learn in this course will serve as a foundation for studying fossil records and current classification schemes in biology. We will begin the course by reviewing the evolutionary concepts of selection and speciation. We will then learn to measure evolutionary change through comparisons with the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium, to understand the process of change through Game Theory, and to interpret and classify changes by creating phylogenies. The course will wrap up with a look at the history of life according to the fossil record and a discussion of the broad range of life forms as they are currently classified. At the…

Ecology is the study of interactions between organisms and between organisms and their environments.  Population ecology is the subfield of ecology that identifies those ecological factorsin the community or in the ecosystemthat regulate a population’s size. Ecosystems and communities involve complex interactions that have evolved over long periods of time.  The species that are present and the interactions we see between them are the result of evolution under the unique environmental pressures that exist in a given environment.  These interactions may be delicately intertwined, such that the loss of a single species from a community could mean the collapse of the entire community in a domino effect.  Thus, biologists are concerned with the preservation of biodiversity in ecosystemsretaining as many different species in the ecosystem as possible so the intricate relationships among species are preserved. In recent years, we have seen a decrease in the biodiversity of ecosystems.  Human activities a…

There are over 100 million horses, donkeys and mules in the world today and owners of these animals can be found on almost every continent and in almost every society. The Horse Course will cover many unique aspects of equine ownership and touch upon the science behind many of today’s management practices.

This course will look at how intelligent and innovative use of the ocean can sustainably deliver the key resources necessary to help meet some of the great challenges faced by humanity.

This course enables students to develop their understanding of research methods, and confidence in designing a research project, choosing and executing appropriate methods, and assessing its intellectual/academic rigour.

Learn how the nervous system produces behavior, how we use our brain every day, and how neuroscience can explain the common problems afflicting people today.

Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes and compounds, such as cellular makeup, that bring about life in organisms.  It is a combination of multiple science fields; you can think of it as general and cell biology coupled with organic and general chemistry.  Although living organisms are very complex, from a molecular view, the material that constitutes “life” can be broken down into remarkably simple molecules, much like the breakdown of our English language to the English alphabet.  Although there exists thousands upon thousands of molecules, they all breakdown into four core components: nucleic acids, amino acids, lipids, and carbohydrates.  As we can make hundreds of thousands of words from just 26 letters, we can make thousands of different biomolecules from those 4 components.  For example, the human genome, containing the necessary information to create a human being, is really just one very long strand of 4 different nucleotides. This course is structured around that approach, so…

The purpose of this course is to explore the subject of human disease, placing special emphasis on the cause of disease at the tissue level.  We will pay close attention to the underlying mechanisms that initiate and perpetuate the disease state.  Much can be learned about the causes of disease at the molecular and cellular level; we will accordingly spend quite a bit of time examining molecules, cells, and tissues and determining how the disruption of their normal functioning by various known and unknown causes can lead to disease. We will begin this course with a basic review of molecules, cells, and tissues in the human body.  We will then discuss the body’s first line of defense, the inflammatory reaction, and the immune system. Finally, we will survey the body’s organ systems.  We will approach each of the systems by examining the ways in which a prototype disease impacts its functioning.  (These “prototypes” will be diseases that impact a large number of patients around the world.)  We…

Biotechnology is the application of biology and biological concepts to science and engineering.  It is the crossroad of the biological sciences with other major disciplines of science, from organic chemistry to mechanical engineering.  The earliest applications of biotechnology involve people of ancient civilizations using organisms to create bread and wine.  The discovery of the Penicillium mold to combat infection is another famous example, as its production involved a specially designed fermentation process using microorganisms.  Nowadays, scientists use almost all aspects of biology in their applications, from DNA to protein to cellular organelles.  Living organisms, especially microorganisms, are thought of as biochemical machinery, able to be edited and changed to create new purposes.  We could program them to create insulin for diabetes patients or to produce fuel for our cars.  Biotechnology is nearly limitless in its applications. As biotechnology is a very diverse topic, this course will in…

Cancer has existed among humans since humans themselves began and has been a subject of urgent interest from very early in our history.  What we call “cancer” consists of a number of different diseases with one fundamental similarity: they are all initiated by the unchecked proliferation and growth of cells in which the pathways and systems that normally control cell division and mortality are absent.  Cancer-cell abnormalities are often due to mutations of the genes that control the cell cycle and cell growth.  To understand cancer cells, then, one must first understand the processes that regulate normal cell cycles. This course will cover the origins of cancer and the genetic and cellular basis for cancer.  It will examine the factors that have been implicated in triggering cancers; the intercellular interactions involved in cancer proliferation; current treatments for cancer and how these are designed; and future research and treatment directions for cancer therapy.