What are drugs? What do they do? How do they do what they do? These questions are part of the field of pharmacology, and over this series we will learn all about a wide variety of different drugs that have clinical use. This will require...

We touched upon sexual selection when we learned about natural selection. Essentially when there is a variance in the reproductive success of a particular sex for a given species, secondary sex characteristics will develop in that...

Human Body for Kids engages young, inquisitive learners, while the depth of material gets older students ready for tests. Join Kevin and his friends to take a fun quiz on the human body!

It's time to learn about microorganisms! These are all the tiny little critters in the water, and the air, and in the ground, and inside you. We didn't even know they were there until a few hundred years ago, but once we started to learn...

We've already learned about certain kinds of modification to the genome, namely in the way of mutations that can occur to specific base pairs, or frameshift mutations when base pairs are deleted or inserted. But there can also be...

Now that we know how drugs move through the body to reach their target, what happens once they get there? By what mechanisms can drugs interact with target proteins to elicit a particular cellular response, and by extension a...

We are able to become physically dependent on a wide variety of substances, which results in what we call drug addiction. What does this look like from a neurophysiological standpoint? What does the drug-addicted brain look like? Let's...

Now we know a bit more about how viruses interact with cells, whether those are bacterial cells, or animal cells, such as ours. But how do they gain access to our cells in the first place? How do viruses get inside the human body? Let's...

Humans, just like most other mammals, display a wide variety of emotional states. But what are emotions? Why do we have them? What purpose do they serve in an evolutionary context? Let's get to the bottom of emotions right now!

We've already learned about Mendelian genetics, which taught us about dominant and recessive alleles and the laws that govern their inheritance. But things are not always so simple. There are situations that go beyond this basic...

We all know that DNA is the molecule of heredity, but we didn't always know that. It had to be demonstrated empirically. As it happens, some of the first evidence put forth had to do with genes found on the X-chromosome of fruit flies,...

At this point, we understand how important the brain is. So naturally, when the brain is damaged in some way, it is usually disastrous for the individual. What are the different types of brain damage? How does the brain respond? We will...

As we know from our understanding of microbiology, pathogens are everywhere. So why don't we get sick all the time? And what are allergies, why do some people have them and others don't? And what are vaccines, how do those work? All of...

One day in 1976, there was a terrible outbreak of an unknown disease at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia. What was the pathogen responsible for this so-called Legionnaires' disease? Let's find out!

Typhoid fever can be a very serious illness, and we may have already heard of it because of Typhoid Mary, a famous carrier in the beginning of the 20th century. Let's go in for a closer look!

In 1896, a mysterious disease spread through the Snake River Valley of Idaho. Some people called it a spotted fever, and hundreds got sick. As it turns out, this was all the doing of some bacteria, Rickettsia ricketssii. Let's get a...

Lots of kids get the chickenpox. I know I did! I was about four years old. It was awful. But now we can learn all kinds of things about the virus called Varicella-Zoster virus, which causes chickenpox and shingles. What is its structure...

Staphylococcus aureus is the bacteria responsible for what we commonly refer to as a staph infection. They are extremely common, but they are also developing antibiotic resistance at an alarming rate. Let's take a look at these now.

Syphilis is another infection that is typically caused by sexual contact, thanks to the pathogen Treponema pallidum. What does this bacterium do? How is the infection treated? Let's take a closer look now.

Lyme disease. It's that one you get from ticks! So what kind of ticks, and where are they? How does that work exactly, and what are the bacteria that are being transferred when they bite? The bacteria are called Borellia burgdorferi,...

We've all gotten food poisoning before, and it's terrible. So what causes it? Just a little bit of bacteria called E. coli, that's all. Let's check them out!

Ok, we are ready to investigate the immune system! So where do we start? Rather than starting on the big objects, like the organs in the lymphatic system, the best way to dive in is to briefly discuss the different types of cells that...

We've touched on apoptosis before, especially when we learned about cancer in the biochemistry series. But let's a closer look. We know that apoptosis is programmed cell death, a failsafe mechanism whereby faulty cells that pose a threat...

Human Body for Kids engages young, inquisitive learners, while the depth of material gets older students ready for tests. Join Kevin and his friends to explore the systems and parts of the body.