This week, my students are thinking about SIDS,
aging,
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard,
oncogenes,
hunger,
individuality,
worm movies,
obesity,
sunscreen, and whether to
divide or die. A fairly typical set of undergraduate concerns, right?
They've all also been reading chapters 3 and 4 of Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and their summaries are here: α,
β,
γ,
δ,
ε, and
ζ.
If you missed it, here's Last week's digest and a brief explanation of what it's all about.
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One of the nice things about being a big shot science blogger is that publishers frequently send you free books to review. In fact, lately they've been arriving a lot faster than I can read them.
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To be a scientist in this day & age is to know how to type greek letters into a computer.
My DevBio class just covered inducers, responders, paracrine/juxtaposed/autocrine pathways (wnt, notch, hedgehog, etc.), and differential gene expression. It's our 2nd week, too. Interesting how profs differ in topic and what the assignments are; my class will be forming groups and doing paper research and class presentations/debates on stem cells.
Thanks. I enjoy the opportunity to sit in on your students' work.
I am so jealous of your students.
When will your students think about mitochondrial bioenergetics?
"Teachers and critics
All dance the poot"
Good course and Devo anyway. :)
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Perhaps a little tedious.
I was very disappointed to read the following:
This statement is not only incorrect, it misses the point. Shame upon Nusslein-Volhard.
Greek letters are easy generally (any good symbol font, or a font that supports unicode, has them). Greek letters with all the ancient-style diacritical marks and accents is often extremely annoying.
PZ: Speaking of entering things, do your students have facilities to submit drawings to the course web page? All the bioscience courses I've done have been big on drawings ...