- What was Pavlov's 1904 Nobel actually awarded for, and how does that differ from what he's remembered for?
- How did Pavlov's background in gastric research prepare him to study conditioning quantitatively?
General Physiology
The functioning of body systems, broadly construed.
- How was Pavlov able to measure a dog's anticipation of food as a physiological quantity?
- How does tropomyosin physically block myosin from binding to actin in a relaxed muscle?
- What triggers the calcium-driven conformational change that rolls tropomyosin aside during contraction?
- What was known about muscle contraction in 1915 before tropomyosin's regulatory role was fully understood?
- What did Krogh notice was different between the capillaries of a resting frog and a working one?
- Why did earlier investigators find the precision of capillary regulation implausibly convenient?
- What two distinct phases did Hill identify in the heat produced by a contracting muscle?
- How did Meyerhof's work on lactic acid chemistry parallel Hill's findings on muscle heat?
- Why is it notable that Hill and Meyerhof reached the same two-phase account through independent methods?
- How do modern athletes and physicians still use the science of anaerobic and aerobic recovery mapped by Hill and Meyerhof?
- What role do bile acids play in digestion?
- What new measurement techniques did Warburg have to invent to study reactions happening inside living tissue?
- How did Sherrington explain the coordination of antagonistic muscles during a reflex like a leg flexing?
- What are chemoreceptors in the carotid bodies and aortic arch, and how do they sense blood gas levels?
- How does the body automatically adjust breathing rate and depth in response to exercise or altitude?
- In what ways did Heymans's mapping of peripheral chemoreception influence modern anaesthesia and intensive care?
- Why is barometric pressure at Everest's summit roughly a third of sea-level pressure, and what does that mean for climbers?
- Why was curare, an arrow poison, useful for muscle relaxation during surgery?
- What risky decision did Leonov make to fit back through the airlock, and what danger did it expose him to?
- How does inositol trisphosphate (IP3) mobilise calcium stored inside a cell, and why does that matter for muscle contraction?
- Which sugars in beans cause intestinal gas, and why can't the body digest them directly?
- How much faster does damp fabric conduct heat away from the body compared to dry fabric?
- How did the researchers measure whether breathing through one nostril affected cognitive performance?
- What happens chemically when polyacetylene is 'doped' with iodine vapour?
- Why does knowing an animal's surface area matter for veterinary drug dosing and heat exchange calculations?
- What age did Nakamatsu claim he intended to live to as a result of his regimen?
- How does the pressure a penguin generates compare to what a human can produce?
- How much does ear length actually increase per year in adults, according to Heathcote's measurements?
- Why did the researchers choose French postmen as their study subjects?
- How much saliva does a typical five-year-old child produce in a day, according to Watanabe and Ohnishi's measurements?
- How does a five-year-old's salivary output compare to that of younger children and adults?
- How did Blavatskyy measure the body-mass index of post-Soviet cabinet ministers?
- What relationship did the study find between politicians' weight and national corruption scores?
- What correlation did Newman find between claimed supercentenarian prevalence and the quality of local birth registration?
- Why might incomplete or falsifiable historical birth records inflate reported rates of extreme longevity in certain regions?
- How does this finding affect confidence in the famous longevity claims associated with places like Sardinia and Okinawa?
- What reflex were Ely and Petersen studying when they investigated milk ejection in dairy cows?