5.2 Type 1 diabetes Type 1 diabetes was previously called insulin-dependent diabetes. This is because in people with Type 1 diabetes their pancreas fails to produce insulin and they are dependent on taking insulin for their treatment. It would be useful to look back at Figure 5 to remind yourself of the actions of insulin. As we have already discuss
3.4 Liver The liver lies towards the right of the abdomen, as you saw in Figure 1. It is a large and important organ in the body, with many functions. It is important in helping control glucose levels, which it does by storing glucose. To do this it changes glucose into glycogen, a substance made of chains of glucose units stuck together.
7 Managing the BSE/vCJD episode: an overview Having concentrated so far on the ‘science’ behind BSE and vCJD, we now turn our attention to how the episode was managed by scientists, politicians and other relevant decision makers. Not surprisingly, we shall find that the themes of communication, risk and ethical issues are inextricably linked to that of decision making (at local, national and international levels). Over the years, the UK Government implemented a great many Orders and Regulations, amending several of these more
3 Reproduction in marsupials The study of mammals requires you to deal with measurements, which we call numerical ‘data’, and you will get practice with compiling and analysing data if you work through all the units in this series. We assume only that you can add, subtract, multiply and divide. In this section, we ask you to use units 1.5.6 Velocity and acceleration as derivatives Recalling that the instantaneous velocity of a particle at time t is given by the gradient of its position–time graph at that time, we can now use the terminology of functions and derivatives to say that the velocity of the particle is given by the derivative of its position function. In terms of symbols: 2.2.2 Collimator The dimensions of the emerging X-ray beam can be altered by the collimator. This helps to ensure that only the region of interest is exposed to the X-rays. 2.5 Heat and life The weight of evidence in the case of Europa points strongly towards ice overlying salty water, at least within the past few millions years although not necessarily today. There are signs that localised heating episodes have melted and fractured the ice. The intensity of tidal heating has probably waxed and waned in step with fluctuations in the amount of forced eccentricity of Europa's orbit, but we can anticipate that conditions on Europa would have varied through a broadly similar range du 2.3.3 Fracturing and motion of the ice shell If the rigid surface layer of Europa's ice is thin (or, at least, has been thin for some of the time), and overlies either water or some kind of weak and mushy ice as indicated by large craters such as Pwyll, then we might expect to find some evidence for fracturing and motion of the rigid ice shell. This is precisely what the pattern of dark bands such as those on Author(s): 5 Designer babies? A character under genetic influence where the distinction between treatment and enhancement is hard to draw is height. Treatment of short stature – with human growth hormone made in genetically manipulated bacteria – has already given rise to controversy about how short a child needs to be for treatment to count as meeting a medical need. That is, how tall is tall enough? As we identify genes that have effects on many other human characters, from appearance to, perhaps, intelligence 5.4 Inspiratory drive The supply of oxygen to tissues such as the heart, liver and WAT is, under euthermic conditions, invariably linked to and dependent upon local blood flow and pulmonary function. However, as we have already seen, under conditions in which blood flow is reduced to a trickle, the control of energy supply switches to local adaptations in the capillaries and tissue cells, including the oxygen affinity of erythrocyte haemoglobin, the supply and metabolism of respiratory fuels and the rate of protei 3.2 Small babies Development continues in the womb until birth, which, in humans, is about 38 weeks after conception. (The often quoted duration of pregnancy of 40 weeks is based on pregnancy beginning on the first day of the last menstrual period.) The duration of the period of development before birth, called gestation, is highly variable. It is not possible to determine its full range in the UK, because medical intervention usually prevents pregnancies going beyond about two weeks after the due date, or te Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should have achieved the following learning outcomes. Knowledge and understanding: demonstrate general knowledge and understanding of some of the basic facts, concepts and principles relating to the development of medicines. In particular: the science behind the development of some drugs to achieve particular tasks; how chemical bonding determines the properties of compounds and provides an explanation for th Introduction The material presented in this unit is taken from SD805 ‘Issues in Brain and Behaviour’ – a 60-point postgraduate course within the Frontiers in Medical Science strand of The Open University's M.Sc in Science Programme. SD805 consists of two topics that are of immense worldwide social, economic, ethical, and political importance – ‘Addiction’ and ‘Author(s): 2.1 The heart of spectroscopy: dispersing light Telescopes may simply be used to collect the light from an astronomical object in order to measure its position, brightness or spatial distribution. However, it is often far more instructive to examine the spectrum of light from an object such as a star or galaxy, namely the distribution of light intensity as a function of wavelength. The spectrum of a light source may be revealed in several ways, all of which involve making light of different wavelengths travel in different dire 1.8 Primordial nucleosynthesis Time: 100 s to 1000 s Temperature: 109 K to 3 × 108 K Energy: 300 keV to 100 keV As the temperature continued to decrease, protons and neutrons were able to combine to make light nuclei. This marked the beginning of the period referred to as the era of primordial nucleosynthesis (which literally means ‘making nuclei’). The first such reaction to become energetically favoured was that of a single proton and neutron comb 3.1.1 Try some yourself 1 In a supermarket the bill comes to £8.70, and you have discount coupons worth £3.50. The assistant says ‘that will be £12.20 please’. Is she right? No. 3.1 Have I done the right calculation? Once you have done a calculation, with or without the aid of a calculator, it is important that you pause for a moment to check your calculation. You need to ask yourself some questions. Have I done the right calculation in the right order? Have I given due consideration to units of measurement? Is my answer reasonable? Did I make a rough estimate to act as a check? Your calculation wil 4.8 General equation of a conic You have already met the parabola, ellipse and hyperbola. So far, you have considered the equation of a conic only when it is in standard form; that is, when the centre of the conic (if it has a centre) is at the origin, and the axes of the conic are parallel to the x- and y-axes. However, most of the conics that arise in calculations are not in standard form. We have seen that any circle can be described by an equation of the form 3.3 Operations in modular arithmetic The Division Algorithm tells us that all the possible remainders on division by an integer n lie in the set We denote this set by 3.2 Congruence The Division Algorithm tells us that, when we divide any integer by a positive integer n, the set of possible remainders is {0, 1, 2, …, n − 1}. Integers which differ by a multiple of n have the same remainder on division by n and are, in this sense, ‘the same’ as each other. We now
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