In-Class Readings

There is so much fascinating biology to explore — far more than we could ever cover in a single quarter of an introductory course. Instead, we will often point you to excellent readings that serve as opportunities to continue your adventure your own way. We will list them here as the course progresses. Interacting with these readings is entirely optional, but highly encouraged.

Week 1

Terrestrial animal tracking as an eye on life and planet by Roland Kays, Margaret C. Crofoot, Walter Jetz, and Martin Wikelski. Science (2015). A wide ranging introduction to the modern state of the art in animal tracking. Every figure tells an important story.

External Resources

Links to external databases and other resources that you may find helpful during the course.

• The Bionumbers Database. An incredibly handy collection of numbers from the molecular and cell biology literature.

• The Human Impacts Database. Useful quantities describing the interactions of humans with Earth’s land, oceans, atmosphere, flora and fauna.

• Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving. This excellent free book by Sanjoy Mahajan (a Caltech alum!) teaches order-of-magnitude estimation in the same style that we will employ throughout the course. Essential reading for those curious to explore more advanced techniques than those we will cover.