Paleontology: Theropod Dinosaurs and the Origin of Birds is a five-lesson course teaching a comprehensive overview of the origins of birds. This course examines the anatomy, diversity, and evolution of theropod dinosaurs in relation to the origin of birds. Students explore various hypotheses for the origin of flight. Watch a preview of the course here: https://uofa.ualberta.ca/courses/paleontology-theropod-dinosaurs

For centuries we have collectively marveled at plant diversity and form—from Charles Darwin’s early fascination with stems and flowers to Seymour Krelborn’s distorted doting in Little Shop of Horrors. This course intends to present an intriguing and scientifically valid look at how plants themselves experience the world—from the colors they see to the sensations they feel. Highlighting the latest research in genetics and more, we will delve into the inner lives of plants and draw parallels with the human senses to reveal that we have much more in common with sunflowers and oak trees than we may realize. We’ll learn how plants know up from down, how they know when a neighbor has been infested by a group of hungry beetles, and whether they appreciate the music you’ve been playing for them or if they’re just deaf to the sounds around them. We’ll explore definitions of memory and consciousness as they relate to plants in asking whether we can say that plants might even be aware of their surroundings. This highly interdisciplinary course meshes historical studies with cutting edge modern research and will be relevant to all humans who seek their place in nature. This class has three main goals: 1. To introduce you to basic plant biology by exploring plant senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, balance). 2. To introduce you to biological research and the scientific method. 3. To get the student to question life in general and what defines us as humans. Once you've taken this course, if you are interested in a more in-depth study of plants, check out my follow-up course, Fundamentals of Plant Biology (https://www.coursera.org/learn/plant-biology/home/welcome). In order to receive academic credit for this course you must successfully pass the academic exam on campus. For information on how to register for the academic exam – https://tauonline.tau.ac.il/registration Additionally, you can apply to certain degrees using the grades you received on the courses. Read more on this here – https://go.tau.ac.il/b.a/mooc-acceptance Teachers interested in teaching this course in their class rooms are invited to explore our Academic High school program here – https://tauonline.tau.ac.il/online-highschool

Neuroimaging methods are used with increasing frequency in clinical practice and basic research. Designed for students and professionals, this course will introduce the basic principles of neuroimaging methods as applied to human subjects research and introduce the neuroscience concepts and terminology necessary for a basic understanding of neuroimaging applications. Topics include the history of neuroimaging, an introduction to neuroimaging physics and image formation, as well as an overview of different neuroimaging applications, including functional MRI, diffusion tensor imaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, perfusion imaging, and positron emission tomography imaging. Each will be reviewed in the context of their specific methods, source of signal, goals, and limitations. The course will also introduce basic neuroscience concepts necessary to understand the implementation of neuroimaging methods, including structural and functional human neuroanatomy, cognitive domains, and experimental design.

This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer review, grant writing, ethical issues in scientific publication, and writing for general audiences.

Imagine if there were an organ in your body that weighed as much as your brain, that affected your health, your weight, and even your behavior. Wouldn’t you want to know more about it? There is such an organ — the collection of microbes in and on your body, your human microbiome.

The course will explore the tone combinations that humans consider consonant or dissonant, the scales we use, and the emotions music elicits, all of which provide a rich set of data for exploring music and auditory aesthetics in a biological framework. Analyses of speech and musical databases are consistent with the idea that the chromatic scale (the set of tones used by humans to create music), consonance and dissonance, worldwide preferences for a few dozen scales from the billions that are possible, and the emotions elicited by music in different cultures all stem from the relative similarity of musical tonalities and the characteristics of voiced (tonal) speech. Like the phenomenology of visual perception, these aspects of auditory perception appear to have arisen from the need to contend with sensory stimuli that are inherently unable to specify their physical sources, leading to the evolution of a common strategy to deal with this fundamental challenge.

The Library of Integrative Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) is an NIH Common Fund program. The idea is to perturb different types of human cells with many different types of perturbations such as: drugs and other small molecules; genetic manipulations such as knockdown or overexpression of single genes; manipulation of the extracellular microenvironment conditions, for example, growing cells on different surfaces, and more. These perturbations are applied to various types of human cells including induced pluripotent stem cells from patients, differentiated into various lineages such as neurons or cardiomyocytes. Then, to better understand the molecular networks that are affected by these perturbations, changes in level of many different variables are measured including: mRNAs, proteins, and metabolites, as well as cellular phenotypic changes such as changes in cell morphology. The BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (DCIC) is commissioned to organize, analyze, visualize and integrate this data with other publicly available relevant resources. In this course we briefly introduce the DCIC and the various Centers that collect data for LINCS. We then cover metadata and how metadata is linked to ontologies. We then present data processing and normalization methods to clean and harmonize LINCS data. This follow discussions about how data is served as RESTful APIs. Most importantly, the course covers computational methods including: data clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised learning. Finally, we introduce crowdsourcing/citizen-science projects where students can work together in teams to extract expression signatures from public databases and then query such collections of signatures against LINCS data for predicting small molecules as potential therapeutics.

Learners who complete Science of Exercise will have an improved physiological understanding of how your body responds to exercise, and will be able to identify behaviors, choices, and environments that impact your health and training. You will explore a number of significant adjustments required by your body in order to properly respond to the physical stress of exercise, including changes in carbohydrate, fat and protein metabolism, nutritional considerations, causes of muscle soreness & fatigue, and the effectiveness and dangers of performance enhancing drugs. Active learning assessments will challenge you to apply this new knowledge via nutrition logs, heart rate monitoring, calculations of your total daily caloric expenditure and body mass index (BMI). Finally, learners will examine the scientific evidence for the health benefits of exercise including the prevention and treatment of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity (weight loss), depression, and dementia.

This is a course about addiction to drugs and other behaviors. It will describe what happens in the brain and how this information helps us deal with and overcome addiction. It will also discuss other topics, such as government policy and our vulnerability to take drugs.

Welcome to an Introduction to Breast Cancer! In this course, we’ll learn a bit about the leading cause of cancer in women worldwide – from the basic biology of the disease, to risk factors and prevention, to treatment modalities to survivorship. We’ll talk to leading experts, explore some of the milestone studies that have pushed this field forward, and have interactive discussions on discussion boards and social media. You’ll even have an opportunity to let us know what topics you want to cover on tweetchats, so we can try to make the content fit your interests. There is something in this course for everyone – if you’re a breast cancer survivor or the friend/family member of someone with this disease, this course will help you to better understand this disease, and give you ideas for questions you may want to ask your doctor. Maybe you’re a healthcare provider or studying to be the same, this course is a great refresher on where the state of the science is. If you’re a healthcare administrator wondering about how the interdisciplinary components of breast cancer care fit together, or an entrepreneur thinking about unmet needs in this space, or someone in public health interested in prevention, this course is also for you! Are you ready to learn a lot, and have some fun while we’re at it? If so, I hope you’ll join us! Let’s get started!!!