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The magnitude of the action potential set up in any single nerve fibre is independent of the strength of the exciting stimulus, provided the latter is adequate. An electrical stimulus below threshold strength fails to elicit a propagated spike potential. If it is of threshold strength or over, a spike (a nervous impulse) of maximum magnitude is ...
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and both the origin and evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910 American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of ...
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...
The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole.One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail.
In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality. [4] [5] [6] Out of all distributions with a given mean and variance, the normal or Gaussian distribution is the one with the highest entropy.
After initiation of an action potential, the refractory period is defined two ways: The absolute refractory period coincides with nearly the entire duration of the action potential. In neurons, it is caused by the inactivation of the voltage-gated sodium channels that originally opened to depolarize the membrane. These channels remain ...
Force plates are platforms, usually part of a trackway, that can be used to measure the magnitude and direction of forces of an animal's step. When used with kinematics and a sufficiently detailed model of anatomy, inverse dynamics solutions can determine the forces not just at the contact with the ground, but at each joint in the limb.
The motion of a particle located at position can be described by the Smoluchowski's limit of the Langevin equation: [11] [12] = + (), where is the diffusion coefficient of the particle, is the friction coefficient per unit of mass, () the force per unit of mass, and is a Brownian motion.