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What is the “command centre” of most animals?

📌The nervous system (NS) is the “command centre” of an animal's body that coordinates its behavior and transmits signals between different body areas.

📌The function of the NS is to control movement of the organism and to affect the environment (e.g. through pheromones) by sending signals from one cell to others, or from one part of the body to others.

📌At the cellular level, the NS is defined by the presence of neurons, also known as "nerve cells".

📌Nervous systems are found in almost all multicellular animals, but vary greatly in complexity.

📌The NS derives its name from nerves, which are cylindrical bundles of fibers that emanate from the brain and central cord, and branch repeatedly to innervate every part of the body. Nerves are large enough to have been recognized by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but their internal structure was not understood until it became possible to examine them using a microscope.

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What do we know about neurons?

✔️One of the two main types of cells in the nervous system are neurons.

🔬✍️They can be distinguished from other cells in a number of ways, but their most fundamental property is that they communicate with other cells via synapses, which are junctions containing molecular machinery allowing rapid transmission of electrical or chemical signals.

🔬✍️Many types of neuron possess an axon, a protoplasmic protrusion that can extend to distant parts of the body and make thousands of synaptic contacts.

✍️Even in the nervous system of a single species, hundreds of different types of neurons exist, with various morphologies and functions. For example, sensory neurons transmute physical stimuli such as light and sound into neural signals, and motor neurons transmute neural signals into activation of muscles or glands. In many species, though, the majority of neurons receive all of their input from other neurons and send their output to other neurons.

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What are glial cells?

✔️The second main type in the nervous system are glial cells.

Glial cells (named from the Greek word for "glue") are non-neuronal cells that provide support and nutrition, maintain homeostasis, form myelin, and participate in signal transmission in the nervous system.

Among the most important functions of glial cells are:
📍to support neurons and hold them in place
📍to supply nutrients to neurons
📍to insulate neurons electrically
📍to destroy pathogens and remove dead neurons
📍to provide guidance cues directing the axons of neurons to their targets.

✍️A very important set of glial cell generate layers of a fatty substance called myelin that wrap around axons and provide electrical insulation that allows them to transmit signals much more rapidly and efficiently.

✍️🧠In the human brain, it is currently estimated that the total number of glia roughly equals the number of neurons, although the proportions vary in different brain areas.

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What are the components of the nervous system?

✍️The nervous system of vertebrates has two components: the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS).

☑️The CNS is the largest part, and includes the brain and the spinal cord.

☑️Structures that do not lie within the CNS, are called the PNS.

The majority of nerves belong to the PNS, even when the cell bodies of the neurons to which they belong reside within the brain or spinal cord.

The PNS is divided into:
🔘the somatic part consisting of the nerves that innervate the skin, joints, and muscles.
🔘the visceral part, or the autonomic nervous system, that contains neurons that innervate the internal organs, blood vessels, and glands, and itself has two parts:
▪️the sympathetic nervous system
and
▪️the parasympathetic nervous system.

ℹ️Some authors also include sensory neurons whose cell bodies lie in the periphery (for senses such as hearing) as part of the PNS; others, however, omit them.

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What are some amazing facts about the animals’ nervous system?

ℹ️Sponges are the only multicellular animals without a nervous system.

🪱🐘The size of the nervous system ranges from a few hundred cells in the simplest worms, to around 300 billion cells in elephants ⬆️.

🔰 The minuscule C. elegans nematode worm has just 302 neurons, but it’s able to carry out the same functions as the nervous systems of higher organisms.

🔰 The tiny Megaphragma mymaripenne wasp ⬆️ only lives for 5️⃣ days and has just 7️⃣4️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ neurons. As it changes from a larva into an adult, it destroys the majority or its neural nuclei until just a few hundred are left, because there’s not enough room in its head.

🔰 At a larval stage, sea squirts have the same anatomical characteristics as most vertebrates, but as they grow, they lose their minds – literally. They digest their own cerebral ganglia, which controls movement, because once they’re sedentary, they no longer need it.

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What are some interesting features of the human nervous system?

🔴 The human nervous system can transmit signals at speeds of 100 meters per second.

🔴 The slowest signal transmission occurs inside the skin.

🔴 Every square cm of human skin contains around 200 pain receptors but only 15 receptors for pressure, 6 for cold and 1 for warmth.

🔴 In the human PNS, nerve cells can be threadlike—their width is microscopic, but their length can be measured in meters.

🔴 There are over millions of nerve cells in human CNS, 100 billion neurons in the human brain and around 13,500,000 neurons in the spinal cord.

🔴 Sciatic nerve is the longest and broadest single nerve in the human body.

🔴An optic (cranial) nerve is the fundamental part of the CNS, and the human eye's most significant sensory nerve.

🔴 B vitamins must be replenished daily as they are only stored in the body in a very small amount.

⬆️ Look at the human nervous system depicted using advanced computer modeling.

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What science studies the nervous system?

Neuroscience, also known as Neural Science, is the study of how the nervous system develops, its structure, and what it does.

Neuroscientists focus on the brain and its impact on behavior and cognitive functions and study what happens to the nervous system when people have neurological, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Neuroscience is also often referred to in the plural, as neurosciences.

Neuroscience has traditionally been classed as a subdivision of biology, but today it’s an interdisciplinary science, which liaises closely with other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, engineering, computer science, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, and medicine.

Some researchers say that neuroscience means the same as neurobiology. However, neurobiology looks at the biology of the nervous system, while neuroscience refers to anything to do with the nervous system.

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Ask Me
What science studies the nervous system? Neuroscience, also known as Neural Science, is the study of how the nervous system develops, its structure, and what it does. Neuroscientists focus on the brain and its impact on behavior and cognitive functions and…
What are the major branches of modern neuroscience?

According to researchers, the following branches of neuroscience, based on research areas and subjects of study can be broadly categorized in the following disciplines (neuroscientists usually cover several branches at the same time):

✔️ Affective neuroscience – in most cases, research is carried out on laboratory animals and looks at how neurons behave in relation to emotions.

✔️ Behavioral neuroscience – the study of the biological bases of behavior. Looking at how the brain affects behavior.

✔️ Cellular neuroscience – the study of neurons, including their form and physiological properties at cellular level.

✔️ Clinical neuroscience – looks at the disorders of the nervous system, while psychiatry, for example, looks at the disorders of the mind.

✔️ Cognitive neuroscience – the study of higher cognitive functions that exist in humans, and their underlying neural bases. Cognitive neuroscience draws from linguistics, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscientists can take two broad directions; behavioral/experimental or computational/modeling, the aim being to understand the nature of cognition from a neural point of view.

✔️ Computational neuroscience – attempting to understand how brains compute, using computers to simulate and model brain functions, and applying techniques from mathematics, physics and other computational fields to study brain function.

✔️ Cultural neuroscience – looks at how beliefs, practices and cultural values are shaped by and shape the brain, minds and genes over different periods.

✔️ Developmental neuroscience – looks at how the nervous system develops on a cellular basis; what underlying mechanisms exist in neural development.

✔️ Molecular neuroscience – the study of the role of individual molecules in the nervous system.

✔️ Neuroengineering – using engineering techniques to better understand, replace, repair, or improve neural systems.

✔️ Neuroimaging – a branch of medical imaging that concentrates on the brain. Neuroimaging is used to diagnose disease and assess the health of the brain. It can also be useful in the study of the brain, how it works, and how different activities affect the brain.

✔️ Neuroinformatics – integrates data across all areas of neuroscience, to help understand the brain and treat diseases. Neuroinformatics involves acquiring data, sharing, publishing and storing information, analysis, modeling, and simulation.

✔️ Neurolinguistics – studying what neural mechanisms in the brain control the acquisition, comprehension and utterance of language.

✔️ Neurophysiology– looks at the relationship of the brain and its functions, and the sum of the body’s parts and how they interrelate. The study of how the nervous system functions, typically using physiological techniques, such as stimulation with electrodes, light-sensitive channels, or ion- or voltage-sensitive dyes.

✔️ Paleoneurology – the study of the brain using fossils.

✔️ Social neuroscience – this is an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior. Social neuroscience gathers biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior. It uses social and behavioral concepts and data to refine neural organization and function theories.

✔️ Systems neuroscience – follows the pathways of data flow within the CNS and tries to define the kinds of processing going on there. It uses that information to explain behavioral functions.

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How many animals have ever existed on Earth?

📌Life appeared on Earth by 3.7 billion years ago. But those first organisms were very simple cells; it would be another 1.4 billion years before multicellular life showed up. Animals probably evolved even more recently, around 800 million years ago.

📌According to scientists, the total number of eukaryotic species on Earth was around 8.7 million, about 7.7 million of which were animals (roughly half were insects).

📌Researchers assume that 99.9% of species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. So, 7.7 million could be multiplied by nearly 100 percent which puts the total number of animal species at roughly 770 million species.

📌Today, there are around 130 billion mammals, up to 428 billion birds, 3.5 trillion fish and an estimated 10 quintillion insects.
If we extrapolate out these figures using the proportions of the 7.7 million existing species, roughly, there have been approximately 4.5 x 10^27 animals ever on Earth.

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What is holding our universe together?

⚛️Our universe is made up of atoms, which in most cases are not just floating around individually, but usually interacting with other atoms (or groups of atoms).

Atoms might be connected by strong chemical bonds and organized into molecules or crystals. Or they might form temporary, weak chemical bonds with other atoms that they bump into or brush up against.

❗️Both the strong bonds that hold molecules together and the weaker bonds that create temporary connections are essential as they are literally holding our universe together.

Chemical bonds are formed because atoms are trying to reach the most stable (lowest-energy) state that they can.

Chemical bonds broadly fall into 2️⃣ categories:
🔄 intra-bonds that hold one building block to another inside a compound
➡️⬅️ inter-bonds that attract one compound to another

Intra- and inter-bonding are further divided into different types, but electrons control all types of bonds.

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What happens if atoms are gaining or losing electrons?

Some atoms become more stable by gaining or losing electrons.

When they do so, atoms form ions, or charged particles.

Ions come in 2️⃣ types:
Cations are positive ions formed by losing electrons. E.g., if a sodium atom loses an electron, it becomes a sodium cation, Na+.
Anions are negative ions formed by electron gain and named using the ending “-ide”: for example, the anion of chlorine (Cl-) is called chloride.

⚛️➡️⚛️The process itself is called electron transfer.

ℹ️The word ion comes from the Greek word ion or ienai, meaning “to go.” English scientist Michael Faraday coined the term in 1834.

ℹ️Certain ions are referred to in physiology as electrolytes (including sodium, potassium, and calcium). These ions are necessary for nerve impulse conduction, muscle contractions and water balance. Many sports drinks and dietary supplements provide these ions to replace those lost from the body via sweating during exercise.

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How ionic bonds are formed?

Ionic bonds are bonds formed between ions with opposite charges. It’s an intra-bond type.

🫙 For instance, positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions attract each other to make sodium chloride, or table salt. Like many ionic compounds, it doesn't consist of just one sodium and one chloride ion; instead, it contains many ions arranged in a crystal lattice (repeating, predictable 3D pattern) ⬆️.

Within sodium chloride all of the attractions between the ions are strong. A lot of energy is required to pull these ions apart. This trait means sodium chloride has a high melting point and a high boiling point. Those charges also mean that when salt is dissolved in water or melted, it becomes a good conductor of electricity.

ℹ️ Just a few grams of salt could contain more than a septillion ions. It’s a quadrillion times a billion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

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What is another way atoms can become more stable?

Rather than fully gaining or losing electrons, another way atoms can become more stable is by sharing them, thus forming covalent bonds, another intra-bond type.

They are more common than ionic bonds in the molecules of living organisms. E.g., they are key to the structure of carbon-based organic molecules like our DNA and proteins. Covalent bonds are also found in smaller inorganic molecules, such as H2O, CO2 and O2.

One, two, or three pairs of electrons may be shared between atoms, resulting in single, double, or triple bonds, respectively. The more electrons that are shared between two atoms, the stronger their bond will be.

Two basic types of covalent bonds are:
▫️ Polar bonds in which the electrons are unequally shared by the atoms.
▪️ Nonpolar bonds that form between atoms of the same element, or between atoms of different elements that share electrons more or less equally.

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What chemical bonds are considered weak?

Covalent and ionic bonds are both typically considered strong bonds.

However, more temporary and weak bonds can also form between atoms or molecules.

2️⃣ types of weak bonds are:

📍Hydrogen bond ⬆️, an intermolecular force (IMF) that behaving a bit like a magnet forms a special type of dipole-dipole attraction when a hydrogen atom bonded to a strongly electronegative atom, exists in the vicinity of another electronegative atom with a lone pair of electrons. For example, in water molecules (H2O), hydrogen is covalently bonded to the more electronegative oxygen atom.
Individual hydrogen bonds are easily broken, but many hydrogen bonds together can be very strong.

📍 London dispersion forces ⬆️ occur between atoms or molecules of any kind, and they depend on temporary imbalances in electron distribution.

ℹ️ These weak bonds are both often defined by a general term of van der Waals forces.

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What is a new ultra-strong chemical bond lately discovered by scientists?

❗️Scientists have recently discovered a totally new type of chemical bond.

⚪️↔️⚪️ In the new study, the researchers dissolved a hydrogen-fluoride compound in water, and watched how the hydrogen and fluorine atoms interacted. What they found was a hydrogen bond with the strength of a covalent bond, binding atoms together into something resembling a molecule.

ℹ️ The new bonds had a strength of 45.8 kilocalories per mol (a unit of chemical bonding energy), greater than some covalent bonds. E.g., in nitrogen molecules two nitrogen atoms are bound together with a strength of about 40 kcal/mol. A hydrogen bond typically has an energy of about 1-3 kcal/mol, an ionic bond - between 5 and 10 kcal/mol.

✍️ According to scientists, this hybrid covalent-hydrogen bond not only challenges our current understanding of what a chemical bond exactly is, but also offers the opportunity to better understand chemical reactions.

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How does electronegativity affect chemical bonding?

✔️Electronegativity
is the ability of an atom to attract a pair of electrons in a chemical bond.

✔️The higher the electronegativity of an element, the more strongly it attracts the shared electrons.

⬆️The difference in electronegativity between two bonded elements determines what type of bond they will form.

⤴️When atoms with an electronegativity difference of greater than 2️⃣ units are joined together, the bond that is formed is an ionic bond.

⤵️When atoms with an electronegativity difference of less than 2️⃣ units are joined together, the bond that is formed is a covalent bond.

ℹ️The concept of electronegativity was introduced by Linus Pauling in 1932; on the Pauling scale, fluorine is assigned an electronegativity of 3.98, and the other elements are scaled relative to that value.

In the periodic table ⬆️ electronegativity increases from bottom to top in groups, and increases from left to right across periods.

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Ask Me
What chemical bonds are considered weak? Covalent and ionic bonds are both typically considered strong bonds. However, more temporary and weak bonds can also form between atoms or molecules. 2️⃣ types of weak bonds are: 📍Hydrogen bond ⬆️, an intermolecular…
What are some hydrogen bonding examples and applications?

I. Some examples of hydrogen bonding are as follows.
☑️ Ammonia
The hydrogen bonds in ammonia (NH3) are formed between nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Nitrogen is a highly electronegative atom that is linked to hydrogen atoms in order to make hydrogen bonds.

☑️ Hydrogen Fluoride
❗️ Fluorine is an element that has the highest value of electronegativity, and it forms the strongest hydrogen bond.

☑️ Alcohols
Alcohols are organic compounds. It contains at least one -OH group. When any molecule containing the hydrogen atom is connected to either oxygen or nitrogen directly, it usually has the tendency to form hydrogen bonding.

☑️ Carboxylic Acid
Hydrogen bonding can occur in a pure carboxylic acid in between two molecules of acid in order to produce a dimer. The hydrogen bonding in carboxylic acid doubles the size of the molecule.

II. Some of the applications and effects of hydrogen bonds are given below.
🟢 Hydrogen Bonds in Plants
Water has the property to stick to itself (cohesion) and also with other molecules (adhesion). When water droplets fall on a leaf, the hydrogen bonds present between the molecules of water are more substantial than the intermolecular forces of adhesion between the water molecules and the leaf. The high surface tension of water is explained by this property.

⚪️ Hydrogen Bonds in Proteins
Intramolecular hydrogen bonding is responsible for different types of proteins such as secondary proteins, tertiary proteins, and quaternary proteins and as well as for the structure of the nucleic acids.

🧬 Hydrogen Bonds in DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
The double-helix model of DNA consists of two intertwined strands held together by a base pair. The hydrogen bonding present between the bases on adjacent strands is responsible for this. Because of different structure bases, adenine (A) always forms hydrogen bonds with thymine (T). Guanine (G) always forms hydrogen bonds with cytosine (C) in contrast.

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