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Kimball's Biology Pages

#1
Yazata Offline
This is a very good resource. It's basically a very complete, detailed and up to date online biology textbook. It consists of hundreds of extensively hyperlinked webpages on all aspects of advanced-introductory biology. (A first course weighted towards cell and molecular biology for biology majors.) If you follow the links, it provides far more detail than normal textbooks and its easy to pursue your curiosity and interests. (I just found out about nucleomorphs.)

The author is a retired Harvard professor who once taught high-school, the information is authoritative and the writing style is extraordinarily clear and easy to understand (the high-school teaching influence). All the relentless jargon of molecular biology is clearly explained. (It's just a fact of life [literally] that what is happening inside each of your billion+ cells is hugely complicated and the various objects, processes and events all have names.)

A good place to dive into it is the index page.

http://www.biology-pages.info/F/FallTerm.html
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Will it be updated every time new data replaces that which is rendered obsolete? Otherwise I'd just keep googling.
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#3
RainbowUnicorn Offline
(Nov 13, 2017 05:21 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Will it be updated every time new data replaces that which is rendered obsolete? Otherwise I'd just keep googling.

While your point may well be excellent, i suspect the exam content & criteria is set to a point that it maintains its own required information consistancy to atleast have annual continuity Big Grin 

my rough guestimation is that exam content has a set range of new variable content which eludes to theory that has been suggested in additional study/reading.

while the questions may change every year, the base content which they question remains fairly consistant year to year.


Quote:advanced-introductory biology

aka 1st year ?
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#4
Zinjanthropos Offline
Quote:While your point may well be excellent, I suspect the exam content & criteria is set to a point that it maintains its own required information consistency to at least have annual continuity

Suspicion is a first impulse and you know what they say about that during a multiple choice exam. I suspect you're right. Wink

I wonder if a teacher ever thinks about one or more of her/his students refuting everything s/he taught them? How would that feel for both parties?
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#5
Yazata Offline
(Nov 13, 2017 05:21 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Will it be updated every time new data replaces that which is rendered obsolete? Otherwise I'd just keep googling.

He started doing this around 2010 or 2011 (pretty recently) and is still working on it today (in 2017). It seems pretty up to date to me.

(Nov 13, 2017 08:24 AM)RainbowUnicorn Wrote:
Quote:advanced-introductory biology

aka 1st year ?

I guess. Look at it yourself and see what you think. I think that it's more or less equivalent to the introductory physics and chemistry sequences that science students take. It imparts the fundamentals that students need to take more advanced upper-division undergraduate biology classes. In fact, if you follow all the hyperlinks, it introduces a lot of that advanced-topics stuff discussed in later classes.

It certainly isn't one of those biology for non-majors general education surveys.

It seems to be intended as an additional study resource for university biology majors, whether enrolled in the introductory biology classes, or those in more advanced classes who need to review background material.

My reason for posting it here, is that it looks like an excellent free independent-study resource as well.
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#6
Secular Sanity Offline
Very cool!  

Thanks, Yazata.

"Living matter uses only a fraction of the elements available to it, but, as the table shows, the relative proportions of those it does acquire from its surroundings are quite different from the proportions in the environment. The composition of living things is not simply a reflection of the elements available them."

http://www.biology-pages.info/E/Elements.html

What if—"these chemical building blocks were subjected to a collection of energy sources that are accessible in principle, but only available in practice when the chemicals are arranged in rare, specially-matched shapes that happen to solve the problem of how to absorb work?"

Quote:As it happens, living things are both marvelously complex and breathtakingly good at meeting the challenges of their environments. We know this is because the life we see today has inherited many of the structural and behavioral adaptations that proved so useful to previous generations. In the biological context, ‘usefulness’ is that which enables survival and self-reproduction. But what’s beginning to emerge from some of this thermodynamic thinking – and what a few of us are eagerly exploring in simulation and experiment – is the possibility that some of the distinctively life-like specialness of how organisms are organized, and which allows them to eat and survive and reproduce, might be recognizable in a broader physical class of systems that do not contain self-copying selves. Instead, they are propelled towards strikingly special shapes by the thermodynamic laws governing positive feedback in the presence of a challenging energy source. This process might explain how evolution can get going in inert matter.

Does the flow of heat help us understand to origin of life?
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