Sir Charles Bell: The artist who went to the roots!

During the 1950s, the landmark Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that when groups must compete with one another, intergroup conflict, hostility, and even violence may result. At the Oklahoman summer camp, two troops of boys—termed the Rattlers and the Eagles—took part in a week-long tournament. During this time, their negativity culminated in derogatory name-calling, fistfights, and even vandalism and destruction of property. However, this work also revealed that such tension could be...

The diverse plant life on Earth—consisting of nearly 400,000 species—can be divided into three broad categories based on biological characteristics: nonvascular, seedless vascular, and seed plants.

The primary organs of vascular plants are roots, stems, and leaves, but these structures can be highly variable, adapted for the specific needs and environment of different plant species.

Ribulose 1,5- bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCo) is a critical enzyme that catalyzes carbon dioxide assimilation during photosynthesis. However, it is an inefficient enzyme, having an extremely slow catalytic rate. A typical enzyme can process about a thousand molecules per second; however, RuBisCo fixes only around three-carbon dioxides per second. Photosynthetic cells compensate for this slow rate by synthesizing very high amounts of RuBisCo, making it the most abundant single...

The Ras-gene-encoded proteins are regulators of signaling pathways controlling cell proliferation, differentiation, or cell survival. The Ras-gene family in humans constitutes three primary members—the HRas, NRas, and KRas. These genes code for four functionally distinct yet closely related proteins—the HRas, NRas, KRas4A, and KRas4B. The involvement of mutant Ras genes in human cancer was first discovered in 1982 and is among the most common causes of human tumorigenesis.
Ras is a superfamily...

Roots, often written as radicals, identify the quantity that must be raised to a specific exponent to produce a given value. A radical expression consists of two main components: the radicand, which is the value placed inside the root symbol, and the index, which indicates the degree of the root being taken. The notation n√a indicates the principal nth root of a. If n equals 2, the operation is the square root, while n = 3 defines the cube root. When n is even, a negative radicand does not...