| source Harvard (X) |
level |
department Science (X) |
An introduction to risks in the environment. Different types of hazards are analyzed and compared: natural disasters, such as tornados, earthquakes, and meteorite impacts; adverse health effects caused by exposure to radiation and toxic substances such as radon, asbestos, and arsenic; long-term effects due to environmental change, such as sea level rise and global warming. Emphasizes the basic physical principles controlling the hazardous phenomena and develops simple quantitative methods for making scientifically reasoned assessments of the threats posed by hazardous events, processes, and exposures. Discusses methods of risk mitigation and sociological, psychological, and economic aspects of risk control and management.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Uses the historical background of industrial development from the New England industrial revolution as the framework for studying the technical aspects of succeeding waves of industrial development. Study and understanding of the underlying technologies will develop the technical knowledge and computational skills to prepare citizens to make informed numerical estimates of energy use and environmental consequences of current and proposed energy and industrial systems. Principles of physics and chemistry are worked into the course as dictated by the topics.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Human biology and behavior are considered in a broad evolutionary context, showing how the facts of development, physiology, neurobiology, reproduction, cognition, and especially behavior are informed by evolutionary theory and comparative evidence. Field and experimental data on other species are introduced with the aim of illuminating human behavior. Behavior is traced from its evolutionary function as adaptation, through its physiological basis and associated psychological mechanisms, to its expression. The role of ecology and social life in shaping human behavior is examined through the use of ethnographies and cross-cultural materials on a variety of human cultures. Topics include basic genetics, neural and neuroendocrine systems, behavioral development, sex differences, kinship and mating systems, ecology, language, and cognition.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
An exploration of the process of biological evolution, the way the biosphere and its inhabitants have changed through time, and how human actions affect the evolutionary process, thereby changing our contemporary biological environment. The mechanics and pace of evolution are examined from the molecular to the species level with an emphasis on the ecological context of natural selection. Modern approaches to the study of evolution - from genome sequencing to manipulative experiments in natural populations - are emphasized. Current controversies over the occurrence of evolution are discussed.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
The steps involved in creation of our habitable planet: the Big Bang, origin of the elements, formation of minerals, origin of the solar system, formation of planets, origin of life, co-evolution of ocean, atmosphere, solid earth and biosphere, development of plate tectonics, operation of the modern whole earth system, and climate regulation. Finally we consider the arising of intelligent life that can understand and influence the planetary system, and whether Earth may be a microcosm reflecting laws of planetary evolution that may be common to a class of planets throughout the universe, or alternatively may be a low probability accident.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Why are humans the way we are? To address this question, this course reviews what happened in human evolution from the divergence of the ape and human lineages to the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens. Emphasis is placed on the primary fossil, archaeological, and comparative evidence for human evolution, and on the principles of evolutionary theory, behavioral ecology, functional morphology, and molecular evolution used to interpret these data.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
What we perceive as "reality" is the best effort of our senses to interpret a deeper, largely invisible, reality that is unnervingly strange. This course will survey the world of very small things, objects with dimensions of nanometers and micrometers. The behaviors of these objects are often entirely counterintuitive; they can also be quite useful. Micro- and nanostructures are the basis both of fundamentally new science, and of ubiquitous technologies: quantum dots, computers, the biological nanomotors that power muscle, buckyballs, tools for examining single mammalian cells, lasers. The course will describe these objects and how they function; it will also touch on issues of commercialization, economics, public policy, and ethics that spring from the avalanche of discovery and invention in this area.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
This course considers the relationship between life and the planet on which it resides. It examines the scientific quest to understand where life might thrive beyond Earth. On Earth, life was born of planetary processes and has been sustained by plate tectonics and other physical processes. Through evolution, life has in fact emerged as major influence on our planet's surface. Fundamental features of terrestrial life and evolution are addressed in the context of astronomy, planetary physics and chemistry. These, in turn, provide a basis for the exploration for other habitable planets, both within our solar system and in the greater universe.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Explores the life histories and adaptations of marine life and the ecosystems of the sea. Centers on the complex interrelationships of organisms, the diversity of various habitats, reproductive strategies, and speciation as well as the interplay of currents, light, temperature, and nutrient supply on the distribution of life in the sea. Emphasis is placed on human impacts on marine organisms and ecosystems.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Direct observations of the Sun and the stars, to learn how we can understand the Galaxy and the Universe from stars, the basic building blocks. In small sections, students conduct visual observations to measure apparent motions of the Sun and stars and make hands-on telescopic observations of the Sun and stars using modern instrumentation to explore their energy output, relative distances, temperatures and chemical composition, and something of their life histories. Lectures and readings discuss the physical nature and evolution of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and how observing stars in distant galaxies enables us to map the Universe.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores the origins and development of knowledge in the human child, in relation to two larger time scales: biological evolution and historical/cultural change. Drawing on evidence from experimental, comparative, and developmental psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and history of science, it focuses on knowledge development in the domains of number, space, mind, biology, physics, and language. Questions include: How does human biology constrain and support human cognition? How variable are human knowledge systems across different cultures and times? What aspects of knowledge are unique to humans? How does knowledge change as children grow and adults gain expertise?
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
The physical and chemical processes that regulate climate and the composition of the atmosphere are introduced, including mechanics, thermodynamics, radiation, and chemical kinetics. Atmospheric temperature and precipitation, weather and climate, human activity as a factor for change, influence of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel on the climate, modification of stratospheric ozone by industrial chemicals, air pollution, acid rain.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Trees are prominent and important organisms in the ecosystem. By photosynthesis, trees convert carbon dioxide into organic molecules that are used as energy reserves and as structural components of these plants. Oxygen is also released. Trees, carbon cycling, and the greenhouse effect are intimately intertwined. This course uses trees as examples to explore several facets of plant biology as they relate to identification, growth, reproduction, physiology of transport, ecology, management, and use of plant products.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Albert Einstein has become the icon of modern science. Following his scientific, cultural, philosophical, and political trajectory, this course aims to track the changing role of physics in the 20th- and 21st- centuries. Addresses Einstein's engagement with relativity, quantum mechanics, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, and technology, and raises basic questions about what it means to understand physics and its history.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
The nature and history of matter revealed by astronomical observation and experimental physics. Explores the Big Bang and models of the universe, stellar evolution and supernova explosions, evidence for invisible matter, and the development of structure in the universe. Demonstrates the physical principles used to interpret astronomical data and to construct a model for the evolution of the universe on the microscopic and cosmic scales. Examines the way microscopic properties of matter determine properties of people, stars, galaxies, and the universe as a whole.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
The physiology and pathophysiology of the human body will be presented with special emphasis on cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, and reproductive biology. Besides learning human biology, students will identify critical determinants of their health as well as the health status of diverse communities. Topics include not only the normal functioning of these systems but also their responses to infection, injury, and environmental stress. Through lectures and laboratories, students will explore how their own body functions. The relative power of diagnosis and treatment of disease (medicine) versus primary prevention of disease (public health) in promoting health will be emphasized.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Explores the ultimate nature of light and develops closely related insights into the structure of matter. An excursion through the physical world that proceeds by means of colorful lecture demonstrations drawn from several areas of optics, acoustics, electricity, and magnetism. The course concentrates on describing natural laws in terms of vivid and useful images emphasizing, for example, the common features of musical instruments, broadcast transmitters, and radiating atoms. The behavior of waves of various sorts is used to explain the fundamentals of modern communication techniques and to illustrate the limitations imposed on our knowledge by the uncertainty principle.
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page
Studies the evolution, over the past three centuries, of our concept of time and of related questions, such as the predictability of the future. Newtonian mechanics envisions a universal time, symmetric between past and future. The distinction between past and future emerges in the 19th century from considerations of statistical processes. In the 20th century, the theory of relativity forces fundamental changes in the concept of time. Time ceases to be universal and becomes entangled with space and gravity. Quantum mechanics limits the predictability of the future and introduces verified effects so weird that Einstein wrote of them, "No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this."
Score: 11.81911 Details | Listing | Web page