This course is about how the brain creates our sense of spatial location from a variety of sensory and motor sources, and how this spatial sense in turn shapes our cognitive abilities. Knowing where things are is effortless. But “under the hood,” your brain must figure out even the simplest of details about the world around you and your position in it. Recognizing your mother, finding your phone, going to the grocery store, playing the banjo – these require careful sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. This course traces the brain’s detective work to create this sense of space and argues that the brain’s spatial focus permeates our cognitive abilities, affecting the way we think and remember. The material in this course is based on a book I've written for a general audience. The book is called "Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are", and is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or directly from Harvard University Press. The course material overlaps with classes on perception or systems neuroscience, and can be taken either before or after such classes. Dr. Jennifer M. Groh, Ph.D. Professor Psychology & Neuroscience; Neurobiology Duke University www.duke.edu/~jmgroh Jennifer M. Groh is interested in how the brain process spatial information in different sensory systems, and how the brain's spatial codes influence other aspects of cognition. She is the author of a recent book entitled "Making Space: How the Brain Knows Where Things Are" (Harvard University Press, fall 2014). Much of her research concerns differences in how the visual and auditory systems encode location, and how vision influences hearing. Her laboratory has demonstrated that neurons in auditory brain regions are sometimes responsive not just to what we hear but also to what direction we are looking and what visual stimuli we can see. These surprising findings challenge the prevailing assumption that the brain’s sensory pathways remain separate and distinct from each other at early stages, and suggest a mechanism for such multi-sensory interactions as lip-reading and ventriloquism (the capture of perceived sound location by a plausible nearby visual stimulus). Dr. Groh has been a professor at Duke University since 2006. She received her undergraduate degree in biology from Princeton University in 1988 before studying neuroscience at the University of Michigan (Master’s, 1990), the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1993), and Stanford University (postdoctoral, 1994-1997). Dr. Groh has been teaching undergraduate classes on the neural basis of perception and memory for over fifteen years. She is presently a faculty member at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences at Duke University. She also holds appointments in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke. Dr. Groh’s research has been supported by a variety of sources including the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, the John Merck Scholars Program, the EJLB Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitehall Foundation, and the National Organization for Hearing Research.

The objective of this course is to give students the most up-to-date information on the biological, personal, and societal relevance of sleep. Personal relevance is emphasized by the fact that the single best predictor of daytime performance is the quality of the previous night's sleep. The brain actively generates sleep, and the first section of the course is an overview of the neurobiological basis of sleep control. The course provides cellular-level understanding of how sleep deprivation, jet lag, and substances such as alcohol, ,caffeine, and nicotine alter sleep and wakefulness. The second section of the course covers sleep-dependent changes in physiology and sleep disorders medicine. Particular emphasis will be placed on disorders of excessive sleepiness, insomnia, and sleep-dependent changes in autonomic control. Chronic sleep deprivation impairs immune function and may promote obesity. Deaths due to all causes are most frequent between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., and this second section of the class highlights the relevance of sleep for preventive medicine. The societal relevance of sleep will be considered in the final section of the class. In an increasingly complex and technologically oriented society, operator-error by one individual can have a disastrous negative impact on public health and safety. Fatigue-related performance decrements are known to have contributed as causal factors to nuclear power plant failures, transportation disasters, and medical errors.

Hello everyone! Welcome to advanced neurobiology! Neuroscience is a wonderful branch of science on how our brain perceives the external world, how our brain thinks, how our brain responds to the outside of the world, and how during disease or aging the neuronal connections deteriorate. We’re trying to understand the molecular, cellular nature and the circuitry arrangement of how nervous system works. Through this course, you'll have a comprehensive understanding of basic neuroanatomy, electral signal transduction, movement and several diseases in the nervous system. This advanced neurobiology course is composed of 2 parts (Advanced neurobiology I and Advanced neurobiology II, and the latter will be online later). They are related to each other on the content but separate on scoring and certification, so you can choose either or both. It’s recommended that you take them sequentially and it’s great if you’ve already acquired a basic understanding of biology. Thank you for joining us!

We have all seen forensic scientists in TV shows, but how do they really work? What is the science behind their work? The course aims to explain the scientific principles and techniques behind the work of forensic scientists and will be illustrated with numerous case studies from Singapore and around the world. Some questions which we will attempt to address include: How did forensics come about? What is the role of forensics in police work? Can these methods be used in non-criminal areas? Blood. What is it? How can traces of blood be found and used in evidence? Is DNA chemistry really so powerful? What happens (biologically and chemically) if someone tries to poison me? What happens if I try to poison myself? How can we tell how long someone has been dead? What if they have been dead for a really long time? Can a little piece of a carpet fluff, or a single hair, convict someone? Was Emperor Napoleon murdered by the perfidious British, or killed by his wallpaper? *For Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students, please be noted that this course will no longer be eligible for credit transfer.

Implant Dentistry is one of the most dynamic and rapidly developing areas within oral health care. In spite of increasing popularity of implantology, it is a relatively new discipline within dental education and remains limited to post-graduate courses offered by dental schools in many parts of the world today. With the vision to help dental practitioners gain clinical understanding of implantology and an opportunity to provide implant treatments to their patients, the Faculty of Dentistry of HKU (ranked No. 1 dental school in the World in 2016) developed this MOOC to provide a world-class quality, unbiased, evidence-based and clinically-oriented course in this discipline. Watch course trailer: https://youtu.be/ZZMLyy2EwEo Who are the faculties? The course teachers include more than 20 implant experts from 10 countries. Among others, you will learn from Professor NP Lang (Switzerland / Hong Kong), Professor Christoph Hämmerle (Switzerland), Professor Rino Burkhardt (Switzerland), Professor Paul Weigl (Germany), Professor Saso Ivanovski (Australia), Professor Man Yi (China), Professor Vasilios Chronopoulos (USA/ Greece), Dr Richard Chan (Australia), Dr Martin Janda (Sweden), Dr Chatchai Kunavisarut (Thailand), Dr Ian HS Yip (Hong Kong) , Dr Michael Ho (Hong Kong), Dr Irina-Florentina Dragan (USA), Dr Adam Siu (Hong Kong), Dr James Chow (Hong Kong), Dr Alfred Lau (Hong Kong), Dr Coral Yao (China), Dr Nikos Mattheos (Hong Kong) and more. What are the contents covered in the course? The MOOC includes 5 modules and runs over a period of 5 weeks. We will begin the journey of Implant Dentistry by exploring how discoveries in biology and technological developments lead to the current practice of dental implants. Then, we will examine clinical cases, diagnose our patients’ needs and expectations and learn the principles of treatment planning. We will learn step-by-step surgical procedures for placing implants and various restorative techniques, directed by current evidence and best practices. Finally, we will investigate major threats and complications of implant procedures and ways to ensure successful treatments and long serving implants. What is the aim of the course? This MOOC has a strong clinical focus and is especially designed to enhance professional learning among dental practitioners and dental students. The course aims to help the students LEARN the fundamentals of implant dentistry, UNDERSTAND the treatment procedures and protocols, and APPLY the competences gained through interactive peer and case based learning. Who is the course for? The course is specially designed to serve multiple groups of learners: From intermediate and experienced general dental practitioners who want to establish and deepen their knowledge in implant dentistry and advance towards implementing implant treatment and restorative procedures, to dental students and recent graduates who wish to gain understanding of implant dentistry and increase their competence in related practice. The course makes good use of evidenced-based education, sound eLearning pedagogies and 21st century “live” resources to engage and create the best learning experience for our students.

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!!!