Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Define matter and elementsDescribe the interrelationship between protons, neutrons, and electronsCompare the ways in which electrons can be donated or shared between atomsExplain the ways in which naturally occurring elements combine to create molecules, cells, tissues, organ systems, and organisms

Build an atom out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and see how the element, charge, and mass change. Then play a game to test your ideas!

Students learn about current electricity and necessary conditions for the existence of an electric current. Students construct a simple electric circuit and a galvanic cell to help them understand voltage, current and resistance.

Students use gumdrops and toothpicks to make lithium atom models. Using these models, they investigate the makeup of atoms, including their relative size. Students are then asked to form molecules out of atoms, much in the same way they constructed atoms out of the particles that atoms are made of. Students also practice adding and subtracting electrons from an atom and determining the overall charges on atoms.

Students act as engineers to apply what they know about how circuits work in electrical/motorized devices to design their own battery-operated model motor vehicles with specific paramaters. They calculate the work done by the vehicles and the power produced by their motor systems.

Students perform one of the first steps that environmental engineers do to determine water quality sampling and analysis. Student teams measure the electrical conductivity of four water samples (deionized water, purified water, school tap water and a salt-water solution) using teacher-made LED-conductivity testers and commercially available electrical conductivity meters. They use multimeters to also measure the resistance of the samples. They graph their collected data to see the relationship between the conductivity and resistance. Then, all students measure the conductivity of tap water samples brought to school from their homes; they organize and average their data by sub areas within their local school district to see if house location has any relationship to the water conductivity in their community.

Students learn about the properties of solutions—such as ion interactions, surface tension and viscosity—as they make their own soap and shampoo and then compare their properties. Working as if they are chemical engineers, they explore and compare how the two surfactants behave in tap water, as well as classroom-prepared acidic water, hard water and seawater using four tests: a “shake test” (assessing the amount of bubbles produced), a surface tension test, a viscosity test, and a pH test. Then they coalesce their findings into a recommendation for how to engineer the best soap versus shampoo. The activity may be shortened by using purchased liquid soap and shampoo from which students proceed to conduct the four tests. A lab worksheet and post-quiz are provided.

What happens when sugar and salt are added to water? Pour in sugar, shake in salt, and evaporate water to see the effects on concentration and conductivity. Zoom in to see how different sugar and salt compounds dissolve. Zoom in again to explore the role of water.

This course covers the derivation of symmetry theory; lattices, point groups, space groups, and their properties; use of symmetry in tensor representation of crystal properties, including anisotropy and representation surfaces; and applications to piezoelectricity and elasticity.

Students come to understand static electricity by learning about the nature of electric charge, and different methods for charging objects. In a hands-on activity, students induce an electrical charge on various objects, and experiment with electrical repulsion and attraction.

Students build their own two-cell batteries. They also determine which electrolyte solution is best suited for making batteries.

Students use conductivity meters to measure various salt and water solutions, as indicated by the number of LEDs (light emitting diodes) that illuminate on the meter. Students create calibration curves using known amounts of table salt dissolved in water and their corresponding conductivity readings. Using their calibration curves, students estimate the total equivalent amount of salt contained in Gatorade (or other sports drinks and/or unknown salt solutions). This activity reinforces electrical engineering concepts, such as the relationship between electrical potential, current and resistance, as well as the typical circuitry components that represent these phenomena. The concept of conductors is extended to ions that are dissolved in solution to illustrate why electrolytic solutions support the passage of currents.