Publishing at the speed of life

Biology is a natural science that studies life and living organisms, including their structure, function, development, interactions, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. The field's scope is extensive and divided into several specialized disciplines, such as anatomy, physiology, ethology, genetics, and many more. All living things share a few key traits, including cellular organization, heritable genetic material and the ability to adapt/evolve, metabolism to regulate energy needs, the...

Constrained by limited energy and resources, organisms must compromise between offspring quantity and parental investment. This trade-off is represented by two primary reproductive strategies; K-strategists produce few offspring but provide substantial parental support, whereas r-strategists produce much progeny that receives little care. These strategies are related to an organism’s survival likelihood across its lifespan, which is represented by a survivorship curve. Three general types of...

Population size is dynamic, increasing with birth rates and immigration, and decreasing with death rates and emigration. In ideal conditions with unlimited resources, populations can increase exponentially, which plots as a J-shaped growth rate curve of population size against time. This type of curve is characteristic of newly-introduced invasive species, or populations that have suffered catastrophic declines and are rebounding.However, realistic environmental conditions limit the number of...

The average velocity during a time interval cannot tell us how fast or in what direction a particle is moving at any given time during the interval. To calculate this, it is important to know the instantaneous velocity, which is the velocity at a specific instant of time or at a specific point along the path. Instantaneous velocity is the quantity that measures how fast an object is moving along its path. In other words, the instantaneous velocity vx of an object is the limit of the average...

Instantaneous velocity is the quantity that measures how fast an object is moving along its path. In other words, the instantaneous velocity of an object is the limit of the average velocity as the elapsed time approaches zero, or the derivative of displacement with respect to time. Like average velocity, the instantaneous velocity is a vector with the dimensions of length per unit time. Instantaneous velocity can have both positive and negative values. The instantaneous velocity can be...

The motion of molecules in a gas is random in magnitude and direction for individual molecules, but a gas of many molecules has a predictable distribution of molecular speeds. This predictable distribution of molecular speeds is known as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The distribution of molecular speeds in liquids is comparable to that of gases but not identical and can help to understand the phenomenon of the boiling and vapor pressure of a liquid. Consider that a molecule requires a...