This book is intended to provide a basic introduction to epidemiologic methods and epidemiologic thinking. After reading this book, you should be able to read an epidemiologic study, understand what the authors did and why, and identify what they found. You will also have the tools to assess the quality of that study—how good is the evidence? What are potential sources of bias, and how might those have affected the results? This book will not teach you enough to be able to design and conduct your own epidemiologic studies—that level of understanding requires several years of specialized training. However, being able to read and understand the scientific literature about human health will allow you to apply that understanding to your own work in a nuanced, sophisticated way.
Given the broad definition of biotechnology applications and products, it is easy to see how there is enormous overlap within the fields of cellular biology, microbiology, chemistry, and biomedical engineering. It is the goal of this textbook to provide foundational knowledge to begin building your biotechnology toolkit and enter an exciting career of making a difference through biotechnology.
Anthropology is the study of humanity, in all its biological and cultural aspects, past and present. It is a four-field discipline comprised of biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. The focus of this book is biological anthropology, which explores who we are from biological, evolutionary, and adaptive perspectives.
Labs in this book supplement the information gained in lecture, as well as providing some perspective and experience with hands-on applications of ideas in pest management. The labs are presented in week-by-week order, so the pre-labs and reading for week 1 are labeled “Pre-Lab 1” and “Week 1 Reading”.
We are happy to welcome you to our second Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook, Biochemistry Free For All. Biochemistry is a relatively young science, but its rate of growth has been truly impressive. The rapid pace of discoveries, which shows no sign of slowing, is reflected in the steady increase in the size of biochemistry textbooks. Growing faster than the size of biochemistry books have been the skyrocketing costs of higher education and the even faster rising costs of college textbooks. These unfortunate realities have created a situation where the costs of going to college are beyond the means of increasing numbers of students.
Welcome to the wonderful world of microbiology! Yay! So. What is microbiology? If we break the word down it translates to “the study of small life,” where the small life refers to microorganisms or microbes. But who are the microbes? And how small are they? Generally microbes can be divided in to two categories: the cellular microbes (or organisms) and the acellular microbes (or agents). In the cellular camp we have the bacteria, the archaea, the fungi, and the protists (a bit of a grab bag composed of algae, protozoa, slime molds, and water molds). Cellular microbes can be either unicellular, where one cell is the entire organism, or multicellular, where hundreds, thousands or even billions of cells can make up the entire organism. In the acellular camp we have the viruses and other infectious agents, such as prions and viroids. In this textbook the focus will be on the bacteria and archaea (traditionally known as the “prokaryotes,”) and the viruses and other acellular agents.
Body Physics sticks to the basic functioning of the human body, from motion to metabolism, as a common theme through which fundamental physics topics are introduced. Related practice, reinforcement and Lab activities are included. See the front matter for more details.
A Primer for Computational Biology aims to provide life scientists and students the skills necessary for research in a data-rich world. The text covers accessing and using remote servers via the command-line, writing programs and pipelines for data analysis, and provides useful vocabulary for interdisciplinary work. The book is broken into three parts:
This 125-page course textbook, entitled Quality Assurance & Regulatory Affairs for the Biosciences, was created by Jack O'Grady, M.S., professor at Austin Community College. This textbook accompanies the course BITC 1340: Quality Assurance for the Biosciences.
