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I am 25 and about to take my first biology laboratory course since high school! I have an undergraduate degree and did take some science classes but it has still been a while and I want to be fresh. Can anyone recommend a good online source of biology, anatomy and physiology review?
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There are lots of such resources out there, but they seem to come in bits and pieces, spread over many different sites. When I finished my master's degree, the last step was an oral examination on the wide-open topic of biology in general. It had been many years since my early days of general biology as an undergraduate. I can tell you what worked for me. Any decent college bookstore sells books that summarize large topics like biology. They are usually sold as 'study notes' or some such. It's all organized in a logical form, and you can work through the whole thing an a day or three. If there are any gaps in your past schoolwork, this process will point them out, and that's when it would be useful to get on the internet and do some quick research on a specific topic. In my day, the internet was still just a gleam in someone's eye, but I was able to simply run through the book of notes and refresh my memory a bit, and I made it through that 'oral examination' (read brow-beating) with very little difficulty.
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Blogs. Just google biology blogs to get you started. Quora even has had the question asked. What are the best biology related blogs? Along similar lines, there are some pretty good Podcasts out there and Youtube channels. I prefer the blogs because 1. I just haven’t gotten into the others 2. blogs tend to be written by experts rather than journalists where the data isn’t vetted so well (TED is a good example - there’s a lot of fringey and non-rigorous science in between some superb top-to-bottom presentations).
Popular science news. I was a subscriber to NewScientist for many years, I just haven’t had time to read it so I’m off right now. Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and National Geographic, are other examples. Some newspapers have very good scientific writers, though they can be hard to spot. The NYTimes and NPR, for example, have long maintained a pretty high standards (though be careful, they’ll have other columnists who dabble in pseudoscience). Similarly, the academic journals news sections (in particular, Nature and Science) function as popular science journalism. These sections are largely independent of their technical sections - be cautioned - the independence means it’s more readable, but it also means the accuracy can be suspect at times. Science runs Sciencenews.com
Technical journals. For the specific stuff. As I said above, the technical sections should be considered separate from the news sections. But there is an in between. The actual articles are going to be too technical for most audiences, but the technical articles in Science and Nature often get short reports that are like an expanded abstract, and written in less technical language. I subscribe to Table of Contents and Alerts, and often just skim the headlines. Journals know they’re too technical and a lot of them have taken steps to modernize and expand to a broader audience. The abstracts and short descriptions often give you enough information.
As you discover topics you’re more interested in, you can find more specialist topics. As a geneticist and plant breeder, I follow a lot of genetics and agriculture. But evolutionary biology is a related interest so I follow that too. Google, as always, is the easy place to start.
I hope that answered your question. Sorry if you were asking for something different.
