Courses tagged with "Nutrition" (81)

Analytical chemistry is the branch of chemistry dealing with measurement, both qualitative and quantitative.  This discipline is also concerned with the chemical composition of samples.  In the field, analytical chemistry is applied when detecting the presence and determining the quantities of chemical compounds, such as lead in water samples or arsenic in tissue samples.  It also encompasses many different spectrochemical techniques, all of which are used under various experimental conditions.  This branch of chemistry teaches the general theories behind the use of each instrument as well analysis of experimental data. This course begins with a review of general chemistry and an introduction to analytical terminology.  You will learn terms relevant to the process of measuring chemical compounds, such as sensitivity and detection limit.  The course continues with a unit on common spectrochemical methods, followed by an extension of these methods in a unit on atomic spectroscopy.  These methods allow…

This lab course supplements BIO304: Human Physiology [1].  Although we cannot virtually replicate the lab experience, this “lab” will familiarize you with scientific thinking and techniques and will enable you to explore of some key principles of human physiology. The material in this lab supplement relates to the material covered in the lecture and reading portion of the course.  While the lecture and reading portion focuses on big-picture concepts, here we will focus more on visual understanding, manipulation, and practical use of your knowledge.  You will review the physiology of the organ systems by using images of models, experiments, and videos.  Then you will be asked to assess your knowledge, which eventually can be put to practical or experimental use. Co-requisite: BIO304: Human Physiology [2]. [1] http://www.saylor.org/courses/bio304/ [2] http://www.saylor.org/courses/bio304/…

This course introduces learners to the principles of learning and behavior by surveying relevant theoretical and empirical approaches within psychology.  The overall emphasis is on the theoretical foundations of psychology as they relate to human learning and behavior.   The following topics will be reviewed: historical perspectives of early learning theories, prevailing theories of human development, classical and operant conditioning, effects stimuli have on learning and behavior, social learning, motivation, cognitive developmental theory in the context of learning stages and processes, memory and human information processing models, and problem-solving methods.  Understanding these human processes is an integral part of psychology and other domains of human behavior, such as marketing, sports, health, education and relationships. Learning theories are an outgrowth from philosophies of thought.  The philosophical approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and the works of Plato and Descarte form the…

This course will introduce you to the psychology behind gender and sexuality, or the study of the different ways our gender roles and sexual identities impact our lives. Although the terms “gender” and “sex” are often used synonymously in everyday speech, this course will assign the terms two different meanings. “Sex” refers to biological differencei.e. whether you are a female or male from a biological standpoint. “Gender” refers to the social and psychological attributes that come along with one’s sex. Though these terms are similar and relate to one another, there is a distinct difference between the two that you should recognize for the purposes of this course. In this course, we will take a look at how our understanding of our own gender and sex can affect different aspects of our functioning, while also identifying the factors in our lives that can impact our gender and sex. While we often assume we know a lot about how gender affects our lives and the lives of the opposite gender, t…

This Research Methods Lab course is part two of the Research Methods series. You should not attempt this course without having first completed the Research Methods course (PSYCH202A [1]). This Lab extends beyond the basics of research methodology and the logic of experimental design, concepts you learned in PSYCH202A [2].  You will learn to put these concepts into practice while conducting laboratory experiments. While we may not explicitly apply all of the concepts introduced in the Research Methods lecture course, remember that each of them will remain relevant during the evaluation and review phases of your research. This course intends to acquaint the student with a variety of different research techniques.  Students will participate in every stage of experimentation, from creation and editing to evaluation and review.   As such, this course will not only review relevant concepts from the Research Methods lecture, but will also broach a number of practical matters, including the standard organizatio…

In this second semester course, we will cover a wide-ranging field of topics, learning everything from the equation that made Einstein famous to why you can’t replace a dead car battery with a household battery. In General Chemistry I (CHEM101 [1]), we studied the basic tools you need to explore different fields in chemistry, such as stoichiometry and thermodynamics.  This second-semester course will cover several of the tools needed to study chemistry at a more advanced level.  We will identify the factors that affect the speed of a reaction, learn how an atom bomb works on a chemical level, and discover how chemistry powers a light bulb.  Topics in advanced organic and inorganic chemistry courses will build upon what you learn in this class.  We will end with discussion of organic chemistry, a topic that is as important to biology as it is to chemistry. [1] http:///courses/chem101/…

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…

Remember that organic chemistry is the discipline that studies the properties and reactions of organic, carbon-based compounds.  This course is intended to be taken after the first two semesters of organic chemistry.  Many of the topics within this outline have been covered in the first two semesters of organic chemistry; however, this course will explore these topics in much greater depth.  It is important to make sure that you have a good grasp of the concepts from earlier organic chemistry courses before moving on to this course. We begin by studying a unit on ylides, benzyne, and free radicals.  Many free radicals affect life processes.  For example, oxygen-derived radicals may be overproduced in cells, such as white blood cells that try to defend against infection in a living organism.  In the first unit, you will learn about free radicals, including oxygen-containing compounds.  Afterward we move into a comprehensive examination of stereochemistry, as well as the kinetics of substitution and el…

Organic chemistry is a branch of chemistry that focuses on a single element: carbon!  Carbon bonds strongly with other carbon atoms and with other elements, forming numerous chain and ring structures.  As a result, there are millions of distinct carbon compounds known and classified.  The vast majority of the molecules that contain carbon are considered organic molecules, with few debatable exceptions such as carbon nanotubes, diamonds, carbonate ions, and carbon dioxide.  Carbon is central to the existence of life as it is an essential component of nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), sugars, lipids, and proteins.  A well-rounded student of science must take courses in organic chemistry to understand its application to various topics, such as the study of polymers (plastics and other materials), hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals, molecular biology, biochemistry, and other life sciences. In the first semester of organic chemistry, you will learn the basic concepts needed to understand the three-dimensional structu…

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…

This course is designed to introduce you to the study of Calculus.  You will learn concrete applications of how calculus is used and, more importantly, why it works.  Calculus is not a new discipline; it has been around since the days of Archimedes.  However, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two 17th-century European mathematicians concurrently working on the same intellectual discovery hundreds of miles apart, were responsible for developing the field as we know it today.  This brings us to our first question, what is today's Calculus?  In its simplest terms, calculus is the study of functions, rates of change, and continuity.  While you may have cultivated a basic understanding of functions in previous math courses, in this course you will come to a more advanced understanding of their complexity, learning to take a closer look at their behaviors and nuances. In this course, we will address three major topics: limits, derivatives, and integrals, as well as study their respective foundations and a…

Sensation and perception are the processes by which we absorb information from environmental stimuli and convert it into data that our brains and bodies use to modify behavior. This course will introduce you to these two closely related, though distinct, processes. We will begin with sensation, the physical process by which we use our sense organs (i.e. tongues for taste or noses for smell) to respond to the environmental stimuli around us. Perception, on the other hand, refers to our interpretation of stimuli. It occurs through cognitive processing and enables us to use information in order to change our behavior. While these processes may seem simple, they are just the opposite: large portions of the brain are devoted to the seemingly straightforward processes of seeing and hearing, and entire sensory organs have developed in order to facilitate them. Further, while the brain is constantly using the information it gathers to make decisions, we are entirely unaware of this activity. Unbelievably, studying il…

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…

This Research Methods course is part one of the two-part Research Methods series, which also includes the Research Methods Lab course. Research is the foundation on which any solid science is built. This course will introduce you to research methodologies frequently used in the social sciences and especially those used in the field of psychology. It is important that you are able to not only identify the techniques used by others but also employ them yourself. The course is designed to provide you with the foundation you will need to apply certain techniques in the search for your own answers. The course will begin with an overview of how research, and its appropriate methodology, came about in science and, more specifically, psychology. We will then go over the ABCs of conducting research, learning how to define “variables” and why they are important. While this course will also touch upon statistics and their importance, it will not require a comprehensive knowledge of the subject. The course will concl…

In this course, you will look at the properties behind the basic concepts of probability and statistics and focus on applications of statistical knowledge.  You will learn about how statistics and probability work together.  The subject of statistics involves the study of methods for collecting, summarizing, and interpreting data.  Statistics formalizes the process of making decisions, and this course is designed to help you use statistical literacy to make better decisions.  Note that this course has applications for the natural sciences, economics, computer science, finance, psychology, sociology, criminology, and many other fields. We read data in articles and reports every day.  After finishing this course, you should be comfortable evaluating an author's use of data.  You will be able to extract information from articles and display that information effectively.  You will also be able to understand the basics of how to draw statistical conclusions. This course will begin with descriptive statistic…

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 advent of computers transformed science.  Large, complicated datasets that once took researchers years to manually analyze could suddenly be analyzed within a week using computer software.  Nowadays, scientists can use computers to produce several hypotheses as to how a particular phenomenon works, create computer models using the parameters of each hypothesis, input data, and see which hypothetical model produces an output that most closely mirrors reality. Computational biology refers to the use of computers to automate data analysis or model hypotheses in the field of biology.  With computational biology, researchers apply mathematics to biological phenomena, use computer programming and algorithms to artificially create or model the phenomena, and draw from statistics in order to interpret the findings.  In this course, you will learn the basic principles and procedures of computational biology.  You will also learn various ways in which you can apply computational biology to molecular and cell…

In BIO101 [1], you were introduced to biology on a microscopic scale when you learned about the functions of molecules, genes, and cells.  In this course, you will learn about biological changes that happen on a very large scale, across entire populations of organisms and over the course of millions of years, in the form of evolution and ecology.  Evolution, the process by which different species of organisms have developed and diversified from earlier forms, has been a central theme in the field of biology ever since Darwin first published his theories about it.  Mounting evidence from many different branches of science all point to the fact that species have experienced a gradual but definite physical change.  In this course, we will learn about evolution and theories that stem from evolution. We will also learn about ecology, the study of the interactions between different types of organisms and their surroundings.  Changes in surroundings will force organisms to adapt and changeoften in terms of th…

Physics 101 is the first course in the Introduction to Physics sequence. In general, the quest of physics is to develop descriptions of the natural world that correspond  closely to actual observations.  Given this definition, the story behind everything in the universe is  one of physics.  In practice,  the field of physics is more often limited to the discovery and refinement of the basic laws that underlie the behavior of matter and energy.  While biology is founded upon physics, in practice, the study of biology generally assumes that the present understanding of physical laws is accurate.  Chemistry is more closely dependent on physics and   assumes that physical laws provide accurate predictions.  Engineering, for the most part, is applied physics. In this course, we will study physics from the ground up, learning the basic principles of physical laws, their application to the behavior of objects, and the use of the scientific method in driving advances in this knowledge.  This first course o…

This lab course supplements BIO101 [1]: “Introduction to Molecular and Cellular Biology.”  Although we cannot virtually replicate a true lab experience, this “lab” will allow you to become familiar with scientific thinking and techniques and will enable you to explore of some key principles of molecular and cellular biology. The material in this lab supplement directly relates to the material covered in the lecture and reading portion of the course.  While the lecture and reading portion focuses on big-picture concepts, here we will focus more on visual understanding, manipulation, and practical use of your knowledge.  In each unit, you will work through tutorials related to important scientific concepts, and then will be asked to think creatively about how your knowledge can be put to practical or experimental use. There are also activities devoted to learning important techniques in scientific study, including microscope use, DNA extraction, Polymerase Chain Reaction, and DNA microarrays.  A…