Forensic Science: Explained. Forensic Science has been the search for infallible truth, with roots born from Greek and Roman expressions concerning the ability of one to prove his persuasive argument. (The word forensic comes from the Latin adjective forensis, meaning…
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Bacteria and viruses are often lumped into a general category of ‘things that can make people sick’. But although they can both cause illness, they are very different agents of infection. All viruses are full time ‘bad guys’; parasites which…
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Many fungi perform invaluable, useful activites without which our world would be very different. Fungi are nature’s garbage disposal machines. Many fungi break down the dead bodies of animals and plants to release nutrients back to the soil. If these…
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Prions are infectious proteins thought to cause disease as viruses do, though they lack the DNA or RNA that forms the command structure of a virus. Prions have been implicated in scrapie, kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy…
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Vascular tissue is a complex type of tissue found in plants, which allows nutrients and water to be transported throughout the plant via two main transporting tissues – the phloem and the xylem. This conduction of water and nutrients enables…
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Amino acids are a very important class of chemical compounds that are 20 in number. Each amino acid is composed of a carboxyl group and an amino group in which both are attached to a CH group. The difference between…
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The ocean is often viewed as being constantly teeming with life. But in reality, most of the ocean is a vast wilderness of blue, with nothing below but thousands of feet of water. It takes a well adapted organism to…
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The term “plankton” comes from the Greek word planktos, meaning “drifter.” Not a single species or biological group, planktic species actually include a wide range of aquatic organisms – animals, plants, and bacteria – that drift in the world’s oceans,…
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For sexually reproducing species, progeny result from the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. Organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring are members of the same species. Organisms that can’t interbreed and produce fertile offspring are separate species….
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When we think of fungi, we mostly think of mushrooms. All mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms. One type of gourmet “mushroom” called a morel does not actually look like the pedestal-shaped mushroom that we are familiar…
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