5.5 Other forms of diabetes By far the three most common types of diabetes are Type 1, Type 2 and gestational. There are other forms of diabetes but we will not be covering them in any more detail. These are forms due to: disease of the pancreas (pancreatitis) an excess of hormones that increase blood glucose levels, e.g. excess growth hormone drugs, for example, steroid therapy, which tend to oppose the action of insulin abnorm
3.6 Fat You may have heard people make comments about their metabolism, for example ‘I am fat because I have a slow metabolism’. Your metabolism refers to all the things that are going on in your body to keep you alive. Different people have different metabolic rates. Some people have low metabolic rates and some have high metabolic rates. Metabolic rate may play a part in someone's weight but it is not usually the whole cause of being fat or thin. Glucose metabolism refers to the way in w
3.1 Introduction The main role of glucose within the body is as a fuel but it also contributes to the fabric (tissue) by attaching to proteins. In people without diabetes, the blood glucose levels are kept within very narrow limits. The body does not allow them to become too high or too low. Several parts of the body are involved in this process. Some are large, for example the liver, and some are very small, such as the cells within the pancreas. Cells are small building blocks of the body and cannot
2 Video activity The video clip included in this section looks at the development of one particular drug. It examines the complex multidisciplinary process that was involved in its discovery. Before you watch the video, read through the Author(s): 2.12 Translating a cladogram into a classification This clip begins with a diagram by Ernst Haeckel published in 1866 (Figure 11). This is an illustration of how little ideas on the relationships of high 1.7 Homologies If homologies could be recognised as such, then the relationships between species could be inferred from their shared homologies. Unfortunately, however, homologies and analogies cannot always be unambiguously distinguished in practice. The risk of confusion is especially great when closely related species are compared, because similarities in their morphology and ecology make the parallel evolution of analogous features in separate lineages quite likely. As with other statements concerning h 1.5 Clades and mammals Are the mammals a clade? Yes, despite Simpson's earlier reservations about their possible polyphyletic origins, morphological and molecu 2.6 Senses and communication … Glance down at the second paragraph of this section, where you will find a sentence about the speed at which eyes adapt from bright light to poor light, and the statement that this process takes 20 minutes for the human eye. With your developing sense of scientific enquiry, that might lead you to wonder how it 1 The pinnipeds, sirenians and cetaceans As you work through this course you will come across boxes, like this one, which give you advice about the study skills that you will be developing as you progress through the course. To avoid breaking up the flow of the text, they will usually appear at the start or end of the sections. As well as th Introduction The versatility of mammals is a central theme of the ‘Studying mammals’ series of units, but surely no environment has tested that versatility as much as the rivers and oceans of the world. Mammals are essentially a terrestrial group of animals, but three major groups have independently adopted an aquatic way of life. In moving to the water, aquatic mammals have had to survive, feed and reproduce using a set of biological characteristics that evolved in association with life on land. This 14 course questions and answers Note: Question 1 is included in Section 3. 1.5 BSE and risks to human health: vCJD Given this background, it is not surprising that the possibility that BSE in cattle might pose a health risk to humans was given serious consideration from a very early stage in the outbreak. Various precautionary measures intended to eradicate BSE in cattle and also to prevent any possibility of transmission of the disease to humans were introduced. We will discuss these in more detail later in the course. At the same time, the public was repeatedly assured by both officials (e.g. the 1.6 Binding forces in molecular and non-molecular substances - a first look As we shall see in Section 4, elementary bonding theories imply that materials as different as salt, iodine and aluminium are held together by different types of chemical bond. However, all binding forces between atoms are essentially electrical, and arise from a balance of forces acting between positively charged nuclei and negatively charg 5.1 Overview The discovery that quantum mechanics permits the tunnelling of particles was of great significance. It has deep implications for our understanding of the physical world and many practical applications, particularly in electronics and the developing field of nanotechnology. This section introduces some of these implications and applications. Applications naturally involve the three dimensions of the real world, and realistic potential energy functions are never perfectly square. Despite these 3.2 Stationary states and scattering in one dimension The key idea of the stationary-state approach is to avoid treating individual particles, and to consider instead the scattering of a steady intense beam of particles, each particle having the same energy E0. It is not possible to predict the exact behaviour of any individual particle but, if the incident beam is sufficiently intense, the result of the scattering will be reflected and transmitted beams with steady intensities that are determined by the reflection and transmis 4 References and further reading There are a wide range of perspectives on science–society relations. In part, this is reflected in the different readings listed below. They have been chosen to address issues that we feel are relevant to current debates about science–society relations. Durodié, B. (2002, April 12). ‘Why I think a dialogue with the public will undermine science’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, p. 16. Gibbons, M. (1999). Science’s new social contract with society, Natur 3.2 Day 1 Timetable
Activity 11
SAQ 3
Answer
Question 2
Day 1 – Monday 19th February 2008