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What is Biology? Biology is the science of life. Its name is derived from the Greek words "bios" (life) and "logos" (study). Biologists study the structure, function, growth, origin, evolution and distribution of living organisms. There are generally considered to be at least nine "umbrella" fields of biology, each of which consists of multiple subfields. Biochemistry: the study of the material substances that make up living things Botany: the study of plants, including agriculture Cellular biology: the study of the basic cellular units of living things Ecology: the study of how organisms interact with their environment Evolutionary biology: the study of the origins and changes in the diversity of life over time Genetics: the study of heredity Molecular biology: the study of biological molecules Physiology: the study of the functions of organisms and their parts Zoology: the study of animals, including animal behavior Adding to the com...

Eclipses had been regarded As Omens in the ancient world On Monday, Aug. 21, people living in the continental United States will be able to see a total solar eclipse. Humans have been alternatively amused, puzzled, bewildered and sometimes even terrified at the sight of this celestial phenomenon. A range of social and cultural reactions accompanies the observation of an eclipse. In ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq), eclipses were in fact regarded as omens, as signs of things to come. Solar and lunar eclipses For an eclipse to take place, three celestial bodies must find themselves in a straight line within their elliptic orbits. This is called a syzygy, from the Greek word "súzugos," meaning yoked or paired. From our viewpoint on Earth, there are two kinds of eclipses: solar and lunar. In a solar eclipse, the moon passes in between the sun and Earth, which results in blocking our view of the sun. In a lunar eclipse, it is the moon that crosses through th...

Teens and dad and mom Agree – cellular devices Are Pervasive Distraction As a university professor and a mother of teen boys, I am immersed in a world of young faces buried in their phones. To be fair, adults, too, are enamored with the tiny, powerful computing devices in the palms of their hands. The patterns of daily life have been forever altered by the ubiquity of digital devices. The world has been rewired. And nobody wrote a user's manual. Advances in digital media and mobile devices, and the rising power of social media, are changing the way people engage not only with the world but also with close friends and family. This generation of parents faces rapidly emerging and unprecedented challenges in managing digital devices and the activities they enable – and must simultaneously wrestle with these issues in their own lives and in the lives of their children. I recently led a research project investigating the effects of digital devices on family life in Japan. As p...

Why latest teenagers are not in Any Hurry to grow Up Teens aren't what they used to be. The teen pregnancy rate has reached an all-time low. Fewer teens are drinking alcohol, having sex or working part-time jobs. And as I found in a newly released analysis of seven large surveys, teens are also now less likely to drive, date or go out without their parents than their counterparts 10 or 20 years ago. Some have tried to explain certain aspects of these trends. Today's teens are more virtuous and responsible, sociologist David Finkelhor has argued. No, says journalist Jess Williams, they're just more boring. Others have suggested that teens aren't working because they are simply lazy. However, none of these researchers and writers has been able to tie everything together. Not drinking or having sex might be considered "virtuous," but not driving or working is unrelated to virtue – and might actually be seen as less responsible. A lower teen pregnancy...

Who are the Millennials? Teenagers, twenty- and thirty-somethings have been dubbed the Millennial Generation, or simply Millennials. But what does it mean? And how old is too old to be a Millennial? Generation Y Definition The term Millennials generally refers to the generation of people born between the early 1980s and 1990s, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Some people also include children born in the early 2000s. The Millennial Generation is also known as Generation Y, because it comes after Generation X — those people between the early 1960s and the 1980s. The publication Ad Age was one of the first to coin the term "Generation Y," in an editorial in August 1993. But the term didn't age well, and "Millennials" has largely overtaken it. But the terms basically mean the same thing. This age group has also been called the Peter Pan or Boomerang Generation because of the propensity of some to move back in with their parents, perhaps due ...

Character tendencies & personality types: what's character? What makes someone who they are? Each person has an idea of their own personality type — if they are bubbly or reserved, sensitive or thick-skinned. Psychologists who try to tease out the science of who we are define personality as individual differences in the way people tend to think, feel and behave. There are many ways to measure personality, but psychologists have mostly given up on trying to divide humanity neatly into types. Instead, they focus on personality traits. The most widely accepted of these traits are the Big Five: Openness Conscientiousness Extraversion Agreeableness Neuroticism Conveniently, you can remember these traits with the handy OCEAN mnemonic (or, if you prefer, CANOE works, too). The Big Five were developed in the 1970s by two research teams. These teams were led by Paul Costa and Robert R. McCrae of the National Institutes of Health and Warren Norman and Lew...