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Below is a list of freely available online biology lab resources, including microscopy, genetics and life science.

General biology and virtual labs

The Interactive Library – This EdInformatics.com site is a list of links to interactive biology sites. Some Java applets are standalone and some come with lesson plans and notes

Johnson Explorations – Online explorations from The McGraw-Hill Companies. Interactive simulations for high school biology classes. Alternate links: 1, 2

TryScience.com – Variety of online experiments

The Biology Place: Classic Edition – A free website appropriate for regular and advanced biology. The LabBench corresponds to the AP Biology Labs

ExploreLearning: Gizmos – Online simulations

Wisc-Online Learning Objects

Biology: Virtual Labs – Appropriate for AP Biology and beyond

Virtual Labs – Appropriate for AP Biology and beyond

Virtual Labs – From HHMI’s BioInteractive

Anatomy, physiology and dissection

See the list of Anatomy Labs

Microscopy, cells and microbiology

UD Virtual Compound Microscope – A virtual microscope

The Virtual Microscope

Virtual Scanning Electron Microscopy – Interactive Java tutorials

Protista Tutorials – Microscope views of organisms. Also shows rotifers

A Virtual Pond Dip

JayDoc HistoWeb – From the University of Kansas Medical Center. A histology atlas that corresponds with the laboratory exercises of the Cell & Tissue Biology course

Genetics and DNA

Genetics Web Lab Directory – Wide variety of genetics simulations and problems. Some are appropriate for middle school genetics; most are appropriate for high school genetics

Genetics – Some K-12 online labs

Virtual Peppered Moths

DNA Restriction Digest and Gel Electrophoresis: A Virtual Lab

DNA Extraction Virtual Lab

The GEEE! in GENOME

Learn.Genetics - Genetic Science Learning Center

Engineer a Crop – PBS interactive site where students can compare traditional and transgenic methods of selective breeding

Health, medical treatment and blood types

Interactive Health Tutorials – From U.S. National Library of Medicine

Medical Mysteries – Solve medical mysteries while learning about diseases and their causes

Blood Typing – Interactive game where you can learn about blood types and also determine what type an accident victim needs for a transfusion

Population biology and dynamics

Population Biology Simulations – From the University of Connecticut. A few population genetics and population ecology simulations written in Java

Population Growth and Balance

Population Dynamics – From MathCS.org

Animal behavior, evolution and life science

The Animal Behavior Project – At the University of Arizona

Life Science – Interactive lessons from learningscience.com

Shedd Educational Adventures – Marine life resources from the Shed Aquarium

Paleo Pursuit – A game from The Virtual Museum of Canada

ENSI/SENSI – Evolution and the Nature of Science Institutes

Illuminating Photosynthesis – PBS interactive tutorial about photosynthesis; not a lab activity

Source: http://onlinelabs.in/biology

(Image caption: A bundle of neurons: A bioengineering team at Brown University can grow “mini-brains” of neurons and supporting cells that form networks and are electrically active. Credit: Hoffman-Kim lab/Brown University)

An accessible approach to making a mini-brain

If you need a working miniature brain — say for drug testing, to test neural tissue transplants, or to experiment with how stem cells work — a new paper describes how to build one with what the Brown University authors say is relative ease and low expense. The little balls of brain aren’t performing any cogitation, but they produce electrical signals and form their own neural connections — synapses — making them readily producible testbeds for neuroscience research, the authors said.

“We think of this as a way to have a better in vitro [lab] model that can maybe reduce animal use,” said graduate student Molly Boutin, co-lead author of the new paper in the journal Tissue Engineering: Part C. “A lot of the work that’s done right now is in two-dimensional culture, but this is an alternative that is much more relevant to the in vivo [living] scenario.”

Just a small sample of living tissue from a single rodent can make thousands of mini-brains, the researchers said. The recipe involves isolating and concentrating the desired cells with some centrifuge steps and using that refined sample to seed the cell culture in medium in an agarose spherical mold.

The mini-brains, about a third of a millimeter in diameter, are not the first or the most sophisticated working cell cultures of a central nervous system, the researchers acknowledged, but they require fewer steps to make and they use more readily available materials.

“The materials are easy to get and the mini-brains are simple to make,” said co-lead author Yu-Ting Dingle, who earned her Ph.D. at Brown in May 2015. She compared them to retail 3-D printers which have proliferated in recent years, bringing that once-rare technology to more of a mass market. “We could allow all kinds of labs to do this research.”

The spheres of brain tissue begin to form within a day after the cultures are seeded and have formed complex 3-D neural networks within two to three weeks, the paper shows.

25-cent mini-brains

There are fixed costs, of course, but an approximate cost for each new mini-brain is on the order of $0.25, said study senior author Diane Hoffman-Kim, associate professor of molecular pharmacology, physiology and biotechnology and associate professor of engineering at Brown.

“We knew it was a relatively high-throughput system, but even we were surprised at the low cost per mini-brain when we computed it,” Hoffman-Kim said.

Hoffman-Kim’s lab collaborated with fellow biologists and bioengineers at Brown — faculty colleagues Julie Kauer, Jeffrey Morgan, and Eric Darling are all co-authors — to build the mini-brains. She wanted to develop a testbed for her lab’s basic biomedical research. She was interested, for example, in developing a model to test aspects of neural cell transplantation, as has been proposed to treat Parkinson’s disease. Boutin was interested in building working 3-D cell cultures to study how adult neural stem cells develop.

Morgan’s Providence startup company, MicroTissues Inc., makes the 3-D tissue engineering molds used in the study.

The method they developed yields mini-brains with several important properties:

Diverse cell types: The cultures contain both inhibitory and excitatory neurons and several varieties of essential neural support cells called glia.

Electrically active: the neurons fire and spike and form synaptic connections, producing complex networks.

3-D: Cells connect and communicate within a realistic geometry, rather than merely across a flat plane as in a 2-D culture.

Natural density: Experiments showed that the mini-brains have a density of a few hundred thousand cells per cubic millimeter, which is similar to a natural rodent brain.

Physical structure: Cells in the mini-brain produce their own extracellular matrix, producing a tissue with the same mechanical properties (squishiness) as natural tissue. The cultures also don’t rely on foreign materials such as scaffolds of collagen.

Longevity: In testing, cultured tissues live for at least a month.

Hoffman-Kim, who is affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the Center for Biomedical Engineering, said she hopes the mini-brains might proliferate to many different labs, including those of researchers who have questions about neural tissue but not necessarily the degree of neuroscience and cell culture equipment required of other methods.

“If you are that person in that lab, we think you shouldn’t have to equip yourself with a microelectronics facility, and you shouldn’t have to do embryonic dissections in order to generate an in vitro model of the brain,” Hoffman-Kim said.

Artwork by Glenn Marshall, Motion Effects by George RedHawk

Lobbying, to most people, looks like bribery — the lobbyist who refuses to contribute to the reelection campaign isn’t going to get a meeting, much less an ally.

No member of congress wants to feel bought. What they want to feel is convinced. It’s the lobbyist’s job to make the members of congress ‘feel’ like they’re making the right decision, not just the decision they were paid to make.

Lobbying, persuasion, or interest representation is the act of attempting to influence the actions, policies, or decisions of officials in their daily life, most often legislators or members of regulatory agencies. Lobbying is done by many types of people, associations and organized groups, including individuals in the private sector, corporations, fellow legislators or government officials, or advocacy groups (interest groups). Lobbyists may be among a legislator’s constituencies, meaning a voter or bloc of voters within their electoral district, or not; they may engage in lobbying as a business, or not. Professional lobbyists are people whose business is trying to influence legislation, regulation, or other government decisions, actions, or policies on behalf of a group or individual who hires them. Individuals and nonprofit organizations can also lobby as an act of volunteering or as a small part of their normal job (for instance, a CEO meeting with a representative about a project important to their company, or an activist meeting with their legislator in an unpaid capacity). Governments often define and regulate organized group lobbying that has become influential.

More research below:

How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy Is Lobbying Good or Bad? Transparency and the Lobby Problem The Lobbying Problem and How We Can Fix It Corporate Lobbying: Bad for Business, Bad for America Influence & Lobbying Lobbying wiki Lobbying: The Scourge of Good Government What is shadow lobbying? How influence peddlers shape policy in the dark The American lobbying industry is completely out of control Lobbyists Explained Lobbyist Documentary Lobbyists in America 5 Crazy Facts About Lobbyists – End corruption. Defend the Republic

How to read a scientific paper

Step 1: begin at the beginning

read the title

get excited for cool science

note the authors 

get mad at them for having more papers than you

spend ten minutes wondering if you’d have been better off going to whatever institution they’re at

die a little inside

Step 2: the abstract and introduction

read the abstract

skip right to the introduction because you’re not completely sure what they’re talking about and maybe that will clear it up

alright now we’re talking

understand the entire first paragraph of the introduction

mostly get the second and third paragraphs

skip over the technical bit at the end because boring

Step 3: the results (aka the good stuff)

read the first paragraph

really not get what’s being said

skip right to figure 1

read the figure caption

call it good, you got the jist

repeat for the remaining figures

Step 4: give up

this paper really isn’t answering the question you had in the first place

you’ll just cite it later it’s fine

Step 5: keep doing science!

fail because of some unexpected and puzzling problem

spend 2-6 weeks troubleshooting and getting nowhere

decide to do another literature search to see if anyone else has had this issue

find the same paper you read before cited a bunch

Step 6: reread

actually like read it this time

get to the end 

find the answer to your question

die a little inside

wonder why you didn’t just read it fully to begin with and save yourself weeks of work

Step 7: follow citations to another paper that looks relevant

repeat entire cycle

wonder why science is so hard

We Were Watching Tv…

Meanwhile… They Were Making The Earth Private.

This is about properties and volumes of money that go beyond your imagination, but even more importantly power to make the laws of countries private, and channeling even the population as every other resource. Right from the seats of school we’re getting ourselves in great debt for trying to get educated, the higher the education the greater the debt, so that the top students are forced to sign for private research and much needed money. With signing comes the privacy of any future discovery, even if some of it gets released, it comes at a very high cost, so that you’ll have to spend half of your life working to be able to afford it - talking about dollars hides the fact that the real cost for anything in this society is how much ‘life’ we spend on getting it! The human genome project was done with public funding, from taxpayers money - and, this is written on the official site:

“Who owns the human genome? 

Every part of the genome sequenced by the Human Genome Project was made public immediately - in fact, new data on the genome is posted every 24 hours. It is true that private companies have filed thousands of patents on human genes over the past several years. We don’t know how many such patents have been filed, whether the patents will be awarded or if they’re enforceable. Most of the patent applications have not been acted upon, so we really don’t know how much, if any, of the genome can be used freely for commercial purposes.”

So… any average Joe could of “immediately” benefited from the research, but with the ‘lack of public interest’, only big corporations (you know… the ones having the researchers and laboratories) were interested in profiting after all.  

Scientific research is private, art collections are private, all the greatest minds from statisticians to lawyers and experts in tax evasion (see panama papers), to the best medical doctors and medical research… even money are private but they don’t teach that in school, about the ownership of central banks, including the american FED. These private 1 percent interests make the global social agenda so it should come as no wonder that the big funding is allocated for searching evidence against global warming , and in the propaganda hiding global warming.

Again - the top 1% of the population owns as much as the rest 99% ! - even tho all that wealth… knowledge and patents, art and medicine, resources taken from the ground and energy, institutions and infrastructure, are all the fruit of all our combined work. If there is someone who did Not contribute… is those very ‘1 percent’!

Society should be about increasing people’s quality of life not burry them in taxes, propaganda and then debt. Hundreds of years of politics, governments and capitalism PROVED WITHOUT DOUBT what are they good for: making society a highly efficient conveyor-belt that gathers wealth from the bottom towards the top of the social pyramid. What end could this possibly have?

CNN failed to stress this? They’ve must of been covering ‘serious problems’. After all… they’re so professional if you’re looking at their involved faces and serious acting. They’ll surely inform you when you have to bail out the country from crisis or when you have to fight a war for oil.

images taken from NOAA 

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Wellness is more than just physical activity and eating right. Wellness refers to the achievement of the highest level of health possible and the maximization of one’s personal potential in each of the 7 dimensions. Total body wellness encompasses emotional, environmental, intellectual, physical, social, spiritual, and vocational dimensions. The seven dimensions are the key to achieving a balanced, healthy, and happy life.

Last year in my introductory course to health sciences, Determinants of Health (HSS 1101) I’ve learned that besides physical wellness, health encompasses 6 other dimensions: (1) social health, (2) emotional health, (3) spiritual health,(4) environmental health, (5) occupational health, and (6) intellectual health.

Taking this class and learning about the 7 dimensions of health made me realized that wellness is much more than merely physical health, exercise or nutrition. It is the full integration of states of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Each of these seven dimensions act and interact in a way that contributes to our own quality of life.

Wellness is achieving one’s full potential. It is self-directed and an ever-evolving process that follows a lifestyle of balance in health that ultimately decreases the likelihood of becoming ill physically, mentally, and spiritually. Comprised of seven dimensions and characteristics, wellness is achieved when a person’s life includes all seven elements in combination and in whole.

7 Dimensions of Wellness A holistic approach to health Seven Dimensions of Wellness The Seven Dimensions of Wellness

Hey everybody I have updated the assessment links since few of you reported some issues with the previous ones.

Complete Wellness Assessment : Click on the petals of the flower to find out more about each of the dimensions of your well-being and take your assessment test!

Wellness Assessment

Take Occupational Wellness Assessment 

Take Emotional Wellness Assessment 

Emotional Wellness Assessment 

Take Spiritual Wellness Assessment 

SPIRITUAL WELLNESS ASSESSMENT 

Take Environment Wellness Assessment 

Take Physical Wellness Assessment 

PHYSICAL WELLNESS ASSESSMENT 

Take Social Wellness Assessment 

Social Wellness Assessment 

Take Intellectual Wellness Assessment

Intellectual Wellness Assessment