Reflective Journal 4

A week has passed and with it comes the end of the month of October. Looking back it seems like it was only yesterday that I have entered MJIIT. How fast time flies when we have so much to do. So this week, we did not enter En. Redzuan's workshop as we usually do on a Tuesday morning but instead we had a talk entitled "Introduction to Bio-electronics" by Dr. Azran. What is bio-electronics then? It is the application of the principles of electronics to biology and medicine. An example of this would be the pacemaker.

So session started with Dr. Azran reviewing back basic electronics which include the basic theorems in analyzing circuits, such as Ohm's law, as well as a review on the components from the schematic symbols to resistor colour codes.

Next he went on to explain about filters. There are basically three types of filters which are low-pass filter, high pass filter and band-pass filter.

 

 

Simple low pass filter circuit

fc = cut-off frequency

So what is a low-pass filter?  Simply it is a filter which allows any signal with a frequency below its cut-off frequency through and removes any other signal with higher frequency. Cut off frequency is calculated by the above formula.

Simple high pass filter

A high pass filter is the opposite of a low pass filter where by it allow signal with a frequency which is higher than its cut-off frequency.

Band pass filter

By combining the two filters before, we can create another filter which is the band pass filter. What it does is to allow signals with a specific range of frequency through and removes the rest. So that was it on electronics. Now we can not have bio-electronics without also knowing about the biological part. So the next part of the session, Dr. Azran explain about molecular biology and explain that each cell nucleus contains our DNA which is the blueprint of our cell.

Just like how computer codes are made up of 0's and 1's, our DNA 'code' is made up of Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T) and Guanine (G). These A,C,T,G make up each code which is contain in the DNA. He then explain that in normal circumstances, a cell which has been 'programed' to do a specific task cannot be altered to be or do something else. But a research done by Shinya Yamanaka has prove that a human skin cell can be 'reprogram' to become stem cell and that has become a huge breakthrough in molecular engineering.

So that's it for this week's class. What will be in store next week i wonder.