Posted in Project Ideas on May 22nd, 2012 Comments Off
Using knowledge about serum levels of certain drugs over time and their latency in the human body, determine the decay rate of a drug in the human body in order to calculate the right amount of that drug that should be administered to patients. Theory: Derivatives of exponential functions (Neuhauser, Claudia. Calculus for Biology and Medicine. [...]
Posted in Project Ideas on May 3rd, 2012 Comments Off
What conditions allow a single infected person to create an epidemic in a homogeneous population of susceptible individuals if the pathogenic organism is fast-replicating and has a sequenced genome that is littered with other bacterial genes? Theory: differential equation models for infectious disease (Stephen P. and John Guckenheimer. Dynamic Models in Biology. New Jersey: Princeton University [...]
Posted in Project Ideas on Apr 15th, 2012 Comments Off
What is the cumulative change in area of habitat, number of endangered species, biomass, etc. over an interval. Theory: Integration (Neuhauser, Claudia. Calculus for Biology and Medicine. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. 231) Cumulative change (Neuhauser, Claudia. Calculus for Biology and Medicine. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. 270) References:
Posted in Project Ideas on Mar 30th, 2012 Comments Off
Most fertilizers have three major nutrients necessary for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (denoted as N-P-K). Choose a crop that you would be interested in growing (e.g. flowers, corn, potatoes, etc.) and determine which major nutrient (i.e. nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) is most important for your crop. Determine the amount of fertilizer you would [...]
Posted in Project Ideas on Mar 3rd, 2012 Comments Off
A cancer cell is a cell that grows out of control. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells ignore signals to stop dividing, to specialize, or to die and be shed. Model and compare the growth rates of normal cells to those of cancer cells. Theory: Derivative as an instantaneous rate of change (Neuhauser, Claudia. Calculus for Biology [...]