new class

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My belief about MOOCs is that their goal should be to hook us on their topic and get us hungry to find out more.  Almost all of the classes are intro level, and there are no 102 classes, let alone any 201, 202, 501, etc, to follow their 101, so a "regular intro class" is not the best use of the medium................

Rather than feeding us a bunch of boring vocabulary and interminable taxonomy, they should be giving us every whizbang in their arsenal, hoping to show us that their topic is so fascinating that we'll want to learn more on our own.

In my humble.

Anyway.  I'd been looking for a MOOC on the human microbiome since I took epigenetics last winter, and this fall, there finally is one.  The people who are teaching the human microbiome class seem to be all over showing us the good stuff.  (Hooray!) 

Microbe = "living organism too small to be seen by the naked human eye" -- "human microbiome" is all the microbes living in and on us, the vast majority of which are *not* harmful, and many of which are absolutely necessary to our existence.

Yesterday I listened to some of the first weeks' microbio lectures.  In just a few lectures they told me all sorts of stuff I had no idea about.  We were told that the Earth's biomass is mostly microbes (not a surprise) and that the number of microbes on Earth is 10 orders of magnitude greater than the number of stars in the *universe*.......................  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Given how many stars there are, this blew my mind......

We were told that humans have millions of "energetic events" every minute (whatever an energetic event is....), and there are microbes living kilometers below the ocean, below kilometers of rock, "in the interstitial spaces in the rock," which have one "energetic event" every 10,000 years.  (How they know this, he didn't say, alas.)  He did say that those slow microbes may be the most longevous organisms on the planet.  !!!!  He also said that if any organisms can survive an asteroid ride through space, those might be the ones........

Study of the planet's microbiome is relatively new.  They want to catalog everything (just as they want to do with organisms that *are* big enough to see with the naked eye), and then to look at all of it in relationship to the rest of the microbiome, and to the rest of life on the planet, etc., etc.  In what ways are microbes which live in extremely dry places alike, even when those dry places are extremely hot vs extremely cold?   One way is that "extremely dry" means "a dearth of plants."  Plants put sugars into the soil around them, which is a happy environment for bacteria, who eat those sugars.  Microbes living where there are no plants have very little to eat, and are seriously at war with their neighbors.  "Fighting for every last morsel they eat."  They tend to produce a lot of antibiotics (and to have a lot of antibiotic resistance).

Lineages of microbes have evolved along with lineages of host animals.  We heard that an animal's gut microbes affect the weight and density of their bones.  (!!!)  Given that flight evolved three different times on earth (pterosaurs, birds, and bats all evolved flight separately), is it the case that their gut microbes might show similarities that would make flight easier (by making for lighter-weight bones)?  This is something that is currently being studied.

So interesting!

These people are all over showing us all the cool stuff, just as I think they ought to be. 

I really like learning about stuff that is totally new to me, and then synthesizing that with what I already know................

I listened to a class on the evolution of life on earth over the summer.  I learned in that class that while we used to think there are bacteria and eukaryotes (organisms who keep their DNA in a nucleus -- some single-celled and some more complex, like us, say), with our new(ish) ability to look at DNA we have discovered there's a whole nother group called archaea, which are single-celled, but enough different from bacteria to be their own group.  No one knew about archaea before the ability to look at a genome, as archaea don't look that different from bacteria.  But when you compare their genomes to those of bacteria, it's clear they are very different.........   That's interesting.

Yesterday I learned that archaea tend to live in the most difficult environments.  Deep-sea vents.  The stomachs of ruminants (it is the archaea in their guts that allow ruminants to digest cellulose, and which produce the methane that is why cows are a significant source of climate-change chemicals).  That's very interesting.  In my humble.

The evolution class told us that there were archaea, but didn't tell us where they live or what they do, missing installing a great hook in our minds, on which we can hang other interesting facts...............  That was a class with a glut of vocabulary and taxonomy, and a shortage of whizbangs....

I'm glad to be in another class where they are working on showing us all the cool stuff, rather than starting with all the boring memorization (as so many brick&mortar intro classes are wont to do!).

I'd been aware of the existence of the human microbiome for years -- the mother of one of my daughter's high school friends studied the human microbiome.  I'm excited to be learning more about it.

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