physiology
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 14, 2006Amanda reviews the lies about sex and contraception that are peddled by the Catholic church in their pre-marital classes:Pandagon goes undercover the lazy way on a Catholic anti-contraception seminar
andPandagon goes undercover the lazy way on a Catholic anti-contraception seminar, Pt. II
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…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2006
Female hummingbird, asleep.
Photo by Dylan Maldonado.
A flash of scarlet and emerald zooms past me as I poke my sleepy head out of the kitchen door, a vibrant splash of summer color against the sullen winter sky. Suddenly, an indignant Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, confronts me, beak-to-nose, demanding his breakfast. Shivering, I retreat quickly into the kitchen to prepare warm sugar water for my feathery guest.
Hummingbirds are classified into the avian family, Trochilidae, which is from the Greek word, trochilos, or "small bird." In fact, the smallest avian species alive today is the…