The life sciences have come a long way since their inception. While it’s hard to say for sure when the life sciences first came about, most experts point to the 18th century.
From the discovery of penicillin to the first human heart transplant, the life sciences have advanced in unimaginable ways. As time went on, many new research areas emerged in the field. There are now over 150 different subfields of biology. Here is how they have changed life in the 21st century.
Microscopes and Four Billion-Year-Old Fossils
The world’s oldest fossils are around 3.5 billion years old. These fossils, known as microfossils, include things like the first crystals in space and desert-living worms over 500 million years old.
Microfossils were discovered by using a microscope to look at rock samples. At the time, scientists thought these fossils were just a side effect of how things break down over time.
Disease Virus Originated from Bacteria-Containing Organisms
Before bacteria took on the form we know today, they were much smaller than their modern counterparts. What’s more? Bacteria were mostly single cells floating around in bacteria colonies (with only a few free-floating cells). Then something happened to change that and cause their bodies to self-assemble into giant chains of cells with what appeared to be only one cell at the end of all those chains, still far smaller than bacteria of today.
Our Sleep Cycle and Why We Love to Wake Up Early
You’ve probably noticed that most people are woken up early in the morning. Although sleep is critical to our survival, there’s a lot we don’t know about it, including how exactly we function when we are asleep. One reason for this is that scientists have only studied it for the last few decades.
In the 1970s, scientists found out that brainwaves can change from slow-wave sleep to REM sleep and back again during a night’s rest. They also realized that sleep could be divided into two distinct phases: one where you feel drowsy and one when you feel awake and wide awake.
But did you know that most people start their days running on what’s known as the “relaxed wakefulness phase” (the deepest state of sleep)? In this state, your body is still in REM sleep, but your brain shows very low activity levels.
Why We Like to Live in Cities
Where we come from and where we live is as important as spending our day; maybe even more important. One of the reasons why humans love cities is that cities give us something relatively rare: a steady supply of food. That’s because cities grow on their own. This happens thanks to the constant influx of people who come and go trying to find their next meal or shelter.
For instance, when you visit a city, how often have you noticed how fast a glass rests unused on the table? We all leave things behind when we move on, but not often enough when it comes to food. This means that our planet reacts just like an organism, growing when needed and shrinking when we don’t.
How Our Skin is Made up of Hundreds of Parts and What They Do
While the largest organ in your body is your brain, the largest part lies between your ears. That’s because all of our skin makes up several other organs (such as your lungs and liver). All of these organs, in turn, make up hundreds more tiny parts that makeup all the layers of skin on our bodies.
The most important role for these skin parts is to protect the internal organs from outside elements, but they also perform other duties. For instance, sweat glands have one main job: to remove toxins from our bodies by secreting them into a tubular duct that runs over to a hole on the outside of our finger where we then spit them out onto the ground for others to pick up and suck back into our systems.
Life Sciences Final Word
The human body is amazing, and because it’s made up of individual parts that all work together to create one extensive, awesome system, everything we go through and learn affects everything else. We’re fortunate to be alive to witness both the most amazing and terrible time in human history.
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