Session 1: How do eggs differ from stones?

• What is Life? How can we differentiate living beings from inert matter? Discussion on traits and features of living beings: reactivity (including motility); matter and energy exchange (including homeostasis); reproduction and inheritance with variations; and evolution.

• How is a living being built? Cells (including various types); single-celled and multicellular life. Cell interactions and communities.

• Reactivity and motion in single-celled organisms: amoebas, flagellates, and ciliates.

• Motion in immobile beings: how plants can move.

 

Session 2: Life: Moving towards happiness, escaping dangers.

• Motion in multicellular organisms. The capability to contract itself – basis for muscles.

• How soft-bodied animals move: jellyfish, worms, slugs. Liquid skeleton of roundworms.

• Hard-bodied beings: external and internal skeletons. Muscular limbs for locomotion in insects, crabs, spiders, and vertebrates (fishes and tetrapods).

• Mechanics of movement: forces, pivot point, lever.

• Living rockets: reactive propulsion in animals, plants and fungi.

• Living Hydraulics in plants (turgor and transpiration) and in animals (echinoderms and arthropods).

• How to overcome gravity: flying animals and plants. Passive and active flight. How wings work.

• Super flyers: seabirds and flying fishes can fly both in the air and in water.

 

Session 3: Get hungry? Recharge your internal battery!

• Energy source for life: food - where to find it and how to use it effectively.

• How we differ from plants (autotrophs vs. heterotrophs).

• Matter and energy exchange in living systems. Global energy transfer from the Sun through Biosphere and back to Space.

• Metabolic pathways. Photosynthesis and respiration. Composing and decomposing: two profitable approaches.

 

Session 4: To Eat a neighbor or to ally with it?

• Eaters’ societies: Food chains and webs.

• Ecology in essence: how living beings create societies. Cooperation vs. competition.

• Lifestyle: to be egoistic or to be altruistic.

• Symbiosis: mutualism – win-win strategy in microbes, plants, fungi, and animals.

• Sharing is caring. Of Me… Is parasitism always nasty?

• Sustainable systems: biobalance and biodiversity.

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Session 5: E Pluribus Unum – One out of many.

• How single cell began to live together: communities and colonies.

• Eukaryotic cell as a communal from of life.

• Further development of cooperation: multicellular life forms.

• New challenge: how to orchestrate complex multicellular organism.

• Homeostasis and regulation – transferring information between cells.

• Chemical communication – hormones. Slow but reliable.

• Endocrine system and essential regulation of complex life.

• Nervous system – lightnings travelling among cells. Fast and targeted messaging.

 

Session 6: Sensing the world.

• How sensory systems developed and evolved.

• Sensing without nervous system: unicellulars.

• What and how we may sense. Human optical, auditory, tactile, and chemical sensors.

• Same prototype but quite a different functioning: sensors in plants and animals.

• Not like us: How to detect invisible light, magnetic fields and electricity.

• Transferring and analyzing the signals from sensors – how to create an image of the world.

• Our world is just our imagination of it. Does reality exist?

 

Session 7: To Protect and to Serve.

• Open world of microbes versus closed system of eukaryotes. Why do we need to protect ourselves.

• Life on frontier: Eternal war

• Evil Invaders and unwanted migrants: pathogens

• How the immune system controls legal citizens and eliminates all the suspicious.

• Innate and adaptive immunity.

• When something goes wrong: your own cells turn into enemies – cancer.

• Mutiny in the armed forces. Attacking the host - autoimmunity.

• Mistaken protection: fighting against imported goods - Allergy.

 

Session 8: Magna Carta of Life: Genome

• The cell’s internal manual: How to build up, to run and to reproduce a living being.

• What type of information does a genome contain?

• How genetic information is encoded and written down. Gene library organization – how to manage DNA and chromosomes.

• How to read genetic information: Transcription and Translation.

• Gene interactions: assembling a human or chimpanzee from the same building blocks.

• Recode and reprogram yourself: artificial gene modifications.

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Session 9: We will never be the same.

• Sexual and asexual reproduction of life. Inheritance. Why does life need variations? Eternal adaptation to constant environmental changes.

• How to rewrite the Book of Life: genes must change. Mutations – inevitable amendments to instructions. Natural selection of new gene versions.

• The Sexual process: speeding up evolution. Gene transfer and exchange. Horizontal and Vertical gene transfer.

• Sex in Bacteria, Unicellulars, Plants and Animals

• Endless chain of generations: the germ line. Your distant great granny was a bacterium.

 

Session 10: Life as a Planet Engineering Force.

• First life on Earth. Biocenoses and the creation of the biosphere.

• Life as a global force modifying Earth. Thriving and crisis periods throughout Earth’s history. The recent Ice Age and present warming.

• Humankind as a new geological player (atmospheric carbon, climate change, energy industry, and circular economy).