Author Archive: admin

Subject areas: psychology, neuroscience Vocabulary: slow wave sleep – a stage of sleep characterized by lack of rapid eye movement (REM) or dreams, and thought to be linked to restoration and recovery in the brain amygdala – area of the brain that is involved in both memory and emotions. It […]

Subject areas: Microbiology, Synthetic biology Vocabulary: Chemotaxis – the movement of cells toward or away from particular chemicals, including nutrient sources or noxious substances. Biofilm – biofilms are an often-sticky dense matrix of secreted proteins, nucleic acids, and carbohydrates produced by bacterial colonies as a protective measure.  Antibiotics have difficulty […]

Well, not quite.  But they are vaguely brain-like blobs… Subject areas: Neuroscience, Developmental Biology Vocabulary: organoid – a mass of tissue that physically resembles and may have some physiological properties of a natural organ in an animal’s body, but is incomplete in form and function. They may be naturally occurring, […]

Subject areas: Cell Biology, Microbiology Vocabulary: apoptosis – programmed cell death. An orderly progression of events gradually breaking down internal cell components. This is regulated by a series of enzymes known as caspases. A signal causes the activation of one set of caspases. These make activate a bunch of other […]

Subject areas: Entomology, Developmental Biology Vocabulary: Trochanter – the part of the femur (upper leg bone) that connects to the hip. Coxa – hip joint nymph stage – In the metamorphosis of insects most people are familiar with (e.g. butterflies), there is a significant change in form from the larval […]

Subject areas: Cell Biology, Developmental Biology Vocabulary: Muscle-derived stem cells – A small subpopulation of muscle cells are able to proliferate and give rise to cells that can differentiate in different muscle cell types. In contrast, mature skeletal muscle cells do not proliferate. muscular dystrophy – a group of diseases […]

  Subject Areas: Cell Biology, Stem Cells, Developmental Biology Vocabulary: Pluripotent – in cell biology, a pluripotent cell is one that can give rise to more than one cell type. When most adult cells proliferate, they divide in two through mitosis, yielding two essentially identical cells. A pluripotent cell on […]

Subject areas: Ecology, Entomology Vocabulary: Parasite – An organism that lives in or on a host organism, and gets its food from, or at the expense of the host organism. Social parasites – Social insects that parasitize colonies of other social insects. The article: Adams, R.M.M. et al. (2013) Chemically […]