Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Unit 10 Reflection

Unit 10 focused on the internal functions of the body. In the first vodcast, we learned about the circulatory and respiratory system. The respiratory system is where gas exchange occurs with the circulatory system. Breathing involves the diaphragm and rib cage muscles. Air flows from areas of high pressure to low pressure. Gas exchange occurs in the alveoli of the lungs. Red blood cells make up 40-45% of all blood cells, and they transport oxygen to cells and carry away carbon dioxide. Platelets help form clots that control bleeding. White blood cells help fight pathogens and destroy foreign matter.
The second vodcast was about the nervous system. The central nervous system includes the brain, brain stem, and spinal chord. The peripheral nervous system has oranial nerves, spinal nerves, sensory neurons, and motor organs. Neurons transmits signals.
There are two types of digestion we learned about. Mechanical breaks down food into digestible chunks using contractions of muscles or breaking with the teeth. Chemical breaks food into digestible and absorbent pieces using enzymes and extreme pH.
webmd.com
The Lymphatic System is a system of tubes and sacs throughout the body that collect waste and blood from tissues. Lymph nodes are organs filled with white blood cells that help fight infection.  

In the beginning of the year, my blog posts were small, not thorough, contained no pictures and/or videos, and did not completely fulfill the necessary requirements. At the end of the year, I have been able to get all of these completed in my blog posts. I am most proud of my Unit 9 Reflection, which is the most thorough review I have ever written, and it is filled with pictures throughout the post. My second favorite post is "Cnidaria," which I like because of how ascetically pleasing the pictures are, and because I got to choose the topic which I wrote about. 

Thursday, May 26, 2016

20 Time Final Reflection

Bioplastics
Photo by Author

In my project I made two batches of bioplastics from two different starches: corn and potato. I added food coloring to the second batch to see how they would look it they were to be commercially manufactured.

My Ted Talk was okay. I tend to be more nervous and prone to rookie mistakes when presenting to smaller crowds. If I could do the presentation again, I would look up more often and talk more to my audience.
Thinking back on my presentation, I probably would grade myself the same or worse. My rookie errors were pretty bad.
Preparing for the talk was extremely stressful. Primarily because I had not even finished my project and I had to give my presentation very soon. In giving the actual talk, I had a poor performance, but I feel like I learned from it and I am glad I "successfully" completed the task.
I have grown in learning that I need to ask for assistance from other people in advance, and now I have fully realized I work far better with projects I can do fully on my own.

Pig Dissection

In this lab we dissected a pig, all the while finding and identifying certain organs and systems and saying what their function is. The purpose of this lab was to better help the students understand and remember the functions of these organ systems within the pig, and within ourselves as well. This greatly related to what we learned in class because it reinforced organ system and function information in our heads.
The most interesting part of the lab for me was when we cut open the pig to find all the organ systems perfectly stacked up, like the pictures in text books. I expected it to be slightly different and less perfectly stacked because, similarly, when taught about the solar system, all the planets are stacked up, when in reality that is very rarely the case.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

20 Time Reflection

I challenged myself with bioplastics because I needed a lot of research and time to complete the task. Also, I needed to be open to new ideas and make the plastics myself. I chose this challenge because it seemed hard but attainable, and the project was interesting. My goal was to find out which starch was better: potato or corn. I mainly focused on creating the bioplastics themselves. My plan was to find sources online to help make the best bioplastic. I procrastinated a lot, but when I finally got to it, the project ran pretty smoothly. Getting materials was very difficult. 
I learned that for more disposable, cheeper items, corn starch was better to use, especially because it was cheeper. Potato starch was better for thicker, more durable items.
If I could do this project again, I would have done it much faster.
The next thing for me to do is to find ways to make useful items out of bioplastics.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Unit 9 Reflection

The first thing I did in this unit was create a presentation about influenza. I learned a lot more about viruses, which is helpful for the unit 9 test, and I got to put my knowledge of creating a presentation and public speaking to the test. Here is my influenza presentation.


The first vodcast was on classification and evolutionary relationships. We learned about taxonomy, which is naming an organism. Binomial nomenclature names come from Greek or Latin, and they are two parts, stating the genus and species. The name would be underlined or italicized, and the genus would be the first name and it would be capitalized. The naming would look like Example name or Example name. 

Phylogeny shows speciation and common ancestors. A cool way for remembering all the taxonomic levels (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species) is the sentence "kings play chess on fined grained sand." The first letter stands for each taxonomic level in order.

The second vodcast was on kingdoms and domains.
In the late 1700s, Woese discovered "bacteria" that produced methane and lived at extreme temperatures, which turned out to be archae bacteria. Archae bacteria lives near very hot things with extreme temperatures, like hot springs and the digestive tract.
Bacteria
Antinomycetes produce antibiotics. Symbiotic bacteria live in the guts and help with digestion, and they are also in the roots of some plants to help fix nitrogen.
There are four kingdoms of eukaryaProtista are very diverse. Examples: red algae, slimes molds, dinoflagellates, and amoeba.

www.ojibway.ca

Fungi are decomposers, heterotrophic, and found in all habitat on Earth. Plantae and animalia are exactly what they sound like.

The third vodcast was on bacteria and viruses. Bacterial cell walls contain peptidoglycan, a network of sugar polymers cross-linked by polypeptides. Gram-positive bacteria have simple walls with large amounts of polypeptide, while gram-negative bacteria have less peptidoglycan and an outer membrane that can be toxic.
Flagella help propel bacteria. Chemoheterotophs take in organic molecules. Obligate aerobes need air/oxygen (aer) to live, while obligate anarobes can't have oxygen. Facultative anaerobes could go either way, depending on their environment.
In a lytic infection, the virus enters a cell, makes copies of itself, and causes the cell to burst. Lysogenic infection, on the other hand, has the virus integrate its DNA into the DNA of the host cell, and then viral genetic info replicates along with the host cell's DNA. Retroviruses use reverse transcripts to copy their RNA genome into DNA.

In the fourth vodcast, we learned about fungi. Fungal cell walls are made of chitin, and they absorb food through hyphae, which are long stands of fungi. Mycellium are underground hyphae. A fruiting body is a reproductive structure that grows above ground, and a spore, like a gamete, has a haploid single cell, and, unlike a gamete, can develop into a multicellular organism by itself, no fusing required. Sac fungi form a reproductive sac, or ascus. Yeasts are single celled sac fungi. Morels and truffles are multicellular sac fungi.
Lichens can form between algae and fungi, while mycorrhizae can form between fungi and plants

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fungi/fungi.html


In the fifth vodcast, we learned more about plants. The first true plants probably grew at the edge of water and evolved through natural selection. Cuticles are waxy protective layers. A plant's vascular system allows resources to move to different parts of the plant. The xylem transports water, and phloem transports sugars.
Major Plant Phyla
Bryophyta (mosses) are the most common. They are seedless and nonvascular.
Pterophyta (ferns) are seedless vascular plants. Its leaves allow for more photosynthesis.
Gymnosperms (cone bearing plants)- their major phyla are cycads, ginkgoes, and conifers.
Angiosperms have seeds enclosed in fruit, and are flowering plants. The flower is the reproductive structure, and the fruit is the mature ovary of a flower.
Angiosperms have two main groups:
Monocots are single leafed, leaf veins are parallel, flower parts are in multiples of three, and bundles of vascular tissue are scattered in stem.
Dicots have two seed leaves, flowers are in multiples of four or five, and have bundles of vascular tissues in rings in the stem.

The sixth and seventh vodcasts were about invertabrates.
Phylum cnidaria are the oldest existing animal groups with specialized tissues. They have two body forms: -polyps and -medusas. The classes are scyphozoans (jellyfish), anthozoans (coral), cubozoans (box jelly), and hudrozoans (hydra). Flatworms, mollusk, and annelids belong to closely related phyla. Flatworms are bilateral, have a solid body, an incomplete or absent gut, and many of them are parasitic. Classes include planarians, flukes, and tapeworms.

1fotonin.com

Phylum molluska are very diverse. They have a complete digestive tract and share at least one of the following: radula (feeding), mantle (epidermis), and/or otenidia (respiratory organ). Most are classified into three (of seven) catagories: gastropods (snails and slugs), bivalves (clams and oysters), or cephalopods (octopi and squids).
Phylum annelidia have segmented bodies. They have a coclum, which is a fluid-filled space completely surrounded by muscle. There are three groups of annelids: earthworms, marine worms, and leeches.

Anthropods have highly adapted features, and they are the most diverse of all animals. They have an exoskeleton made of chitin, joined appendages, and segmented body parts. Anthropods are classified into five groups: trilobites (extinct, bottom feeders), crustaceans (live oceans, freshwater streams, and on land), chelicerates (specialized dagger-like mouthparts. ex: scorpions), insects, and myriapods (long bodies and many pairs of legs. ex: millipedes). Anthropods have an open circulatory system, sensory organs like antennae made of modified cuticle. Most have compound eyes. They have body segmentation similar to annelids. Molecular evidence says segmentation is analogous development.
Insects are dominant terrestrial anthropods in nearly every ecological niche. They have three pairs of legs, one antennae, a head, thorax, and an abdomen. They reproduce through metamorphosis (larva, nymph, adult).
Crustaceans evolved as marine anthropods. They have cepholathorax, abdomen, one pair of appendages per segment, two pairs of antennae, an exoskeleton, and a carapace. They split up into three groups: decapods (10 legs ex; lobsters and crabs), barnacles (sessile filter feeders wrapped in a hard shell), and isopods (flattened bodies and seven pairs of legs ex: pillbugs). Echinoderms have radial symmetry have an internal skeleton made of interlocking ossicles (calcite honeycomb). They also have a water vascular system, which is a series of waterfilled ring canals around a central disk. Canals store water used for circulation and movement, and changes in water pressure extend and retract tube feet.
Crustaceans have a complete digestive tract. Some can regenerate limbs, and most reproduce sexually. The five classes of crustaceans are: feather stars and sea lilies, sea cucumbers, sea stars, brittle stars and basket stars, and sea urchins, biscuits, and sand dollars.


The eighth and ninth vodcast were on chordates. The phylum chordata contains all vertebrates and some invertebrates. Their exoskeleton allows vertebrates to grow to large sizes. An exoskeleton is internal and made of bone or cartilage. Amniotes develop inside a thin, tough, membraneous sac as an embryo or fetus. Chordates share four features at some point in development: notochord ("backbone"), hollow nerve chord, pharyngeal slits, and a tail. Most chordates lose some of all of these characteristics in adulthood.
The classes of vertebrates are: agnatha (jawless fish), condricthyes (cartilaginous fish with jaws), osteicthyes (bony fish with jaws), amphibia (four limbs, water/land), reptillia (reptiles-amniote-egg surrounded by membrane), aves (birds, presence of feathers, and amniotes), and mammalia (mammals, presence of hair, and amniotes).
Vertebrates have a segmented backbone. Jaws help an organism become a successful predator. Four limbs help move an organism from water to land. Feathers insulate birds from the cold and help them to fly. Hair also helps insulate body temperature.
In the class agnatha, they were the first recognizable vertebrates. Groups of jawless fish include lampreys and hag fish. Jaws developed from gill arches located around the pharynix. All fish have a lateral line system, which is a sensory system that is sensitive to small changes in water movement.
Condricthyes have skeletons made of cartilage, they move to breathe, and their main groups are rat fish and sharks.
Osteicthyes have a bony skeleton and a swim bladder that helps it float higher or lower.
Lobe-finned fish are paired pectoral and pelvic fins that are round in shape and supported by a single bone.
Amphibians evolved from lobe finned fish, which were the first animals with four limbs. Their adaptions include large shoulder and hip bones, being mobile, muscular tongue, breathing through skin or gills/lungs, laying eggs, and being able to move from water to land. Some amphibians are salamanders, frogs, and toads.
An amniotic egg is almost completely waterproof. All aminotes have two circuits of blood vessels. The pulmony circuit moves blood from heart to lungs. The systemic circuit moves from the heart to the rest of the body. Amniotes have three or four chambered hearts, reptiles and amphibians have three, and birds and mammals have four chambered hearts. Amniotes can be ectothermic or endothermic. Ectothermic amniotes have body temperature of the surrounding evironment. Endotherms use metabolic heat to keep warm, which enable them to live in a wider range of climates.
Reptiles are ectotherms, covered with dry scales, reproduce with eggs, have cloica, and a three chambered heart. They have two reproductive strategies. One is that oviparous reptiles deposit eggs into an external net. The second is that viviparous reptiles retain eggs and give birth to live offspring. Crocodillians are more closely related to birds than lizards and snakes. They are semi-aquatic and have 23 species. Crocodiles have a U-shaped snout, while alligators have a rounded snout.
Birds evolved from a therapod dinosaurs. Birds, like dinosaurs, have hollowed bones, fused collarbones that form U-shaped wishbone, rearranged muscles in hips and legs, "hands" (lost fourth and fifth fingers), and feathers. Archaeopteryx represents a transition from therapods to birds.
Mammals are active, large-brained endotherms with complex social, feeding, and reproductive behaviors. They have hair to retain heat, mammary glands to produce milk, middle ear with three bones to hear higher pitched sounds, and a chewing jaw.
Monotrems lay eggs. Marsupials give birth to live young that grow to maturity inside a pouch. Eutherians give birth to young that have completed fetal development.




Friday, April 29, 2016

My Inner Fish

The primary topic of this video series, My Inner Fish, was evolution. The evolution in this video series specialized in fish to reptile to mammal to human. We learned about evolution and Earth's timeline in previous units, but from a much broader perspective and not as much focus on the evolution of humans. We also learned in the video about the evolution of certain human traits, which we did not do as much in different units.
"Why are mass extinctions important?"
Mass extinctions are important because so many organisms disappear from the face of the Earth forever, drastically changing the Earth's present and future. Also, because mass extinctions destroy so many large organisms, it gives opportunity to smaller organisms to grow and possibly evolve more. A question I have is "Did more large organisms die off in mass extinctions than small organisms?"
"What event needed to take place for the mammals to emerge and truly flourish?"
The extinction of the dinosaurs needed to take place. With the dinosaurs gone, mammals had less predators and more room to grow and expand throughout the area. A question I have is "how did reptiles do once the dinosaurs passed?
"Image result for mass extinction
science.nationalgeographic.com

Monday, April 18, 2016

Nearing the End

I am almost at the end of my 20 Time project. Today in class, I planned out what information I would need to have and maybe even finalize for the Ted Talk presentation. The next step is to finalize all the information and possibly take pictures of the items I used to make the bioplastics and maybe even the bioplastics themselves.
Making the bioplastics was easier than I thought it would be, and it took about an hour to solidify.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Cnidaria

Sea nettle (Chrysaora fuscescens) 2.jpgSea nettles.jpg

Pictured above are Pacific sea nettles, or Crysaora fuscescens. These come from the phylum Cnidaria. Cnidaria comes from the domain Eukaryota and the kingdom Animalia. The bell of the sea nettle can grow larger than one meter, or three feet, in diameter, but most are less than 50 centimeters across. They have 24 undulating maroon tentacles that can drag behind the Pacific sea nettle as far as 15 feet. It has a sting, but it is rarely dangerous. Its tentacles are used for protection and to kill its food. As this organism drifts throughout the ocean, it captures its prey in its tentacles, killing it with the toxins released, or its "stings," and moves the prey up to its mouth as it begins digestion.
The Pacific sea nettles are capable of asexual production in its polyp stage, and sexual reproduction in its medusa stage. It's Latin name Chrysaora comes from the Greek mythological Chrysaor, brother of Pegasus and son of Medusa and Poseidon. Chrysaor translated means "he who has a golend armament." 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysaora_fuscescens

Monday, April 11, 2016

Geologic Timeline

Three major events in Earth's history are when the dinosaurs went extinct, mammals went into existence, and Earth's temperature settled. The scale of Earth's history is long and shows the change in Earth in almost every way possible, from the organisms to the amount of water on Earth to the temperature on Earth. I was really surprised that we were able to learn and know about all of this. On our time on Earth, we probably impacted the temperature the most, raising it incredibly. My only question is why did Earth change in temperature. Image result for geologic time scale
en.wikapedia.org

Monday, March 28, 2016

3rd Blog Post: Buying the Basics

I have finally bought my supplies. It was a major setback not getting them sooner. The next step is to finally get started on the experiment and making the plastics. I have learned that I need to ask help sooner from others in order to get things done faster.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Unit 8 Reflection

This unit was primarily about gene selection and how evolution happened and how it works. Through the "Bird Beak Lab," we learned how different phenotypes help and hurt organisms in an environment, and how everything can change when a new factor is randomly added in.
Image result for birds with weird beaks
In the "Hunger Games Lab," the idea of natural selection was reinforced when we experimented with how different react to environments, and how the future populations start to look like the "winners," or the organisms with the best traits.
Through vodcasts, we learned about Darwin's observations and conclusions about natural selection, ultimately saying that future generations look like the organisms with the best traits to survive. We learned how to determine allele frequency. First, you add up the total of all alleles. Then, add up the total for each type of allele. For each type, divide the number by the total. If the allele frequency has changed, then the population has evolved.
We were taught about different causes of speciation, such as behavioral isolation, caused by changes in courtship/mating behaviors or occupying different niches, and temporal isolation, in which timing prevents reproduction between populations.
Genetic drifts is when a random event drastically changes a population and results in change of allele frequency.
Lastly, we learned a lot about the history of life. In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted lab experiments that showed that the abiotic synthesis of organic molecules in a reducing atmosphere is possible. Amino acids have been found in meteorites, possibly serving as building blocks for life. 
History is broken into eras, while eras are broken into periods.
I want to learn more about how we know about the history of Earth.
In projects, I have worked towards becoming more assertive by taking a step back in projects and allowing people to do more of the work while not being micromanaged. I still need to work on finding a happy medium between this, doing work myself, and making sure everyone is still working on what they are supposed to be doing.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Hunger Games Lab

1. This lab showed natural selection. In this lab, we ran feeding tests to find the organism with the best traits. This lab stimulated how each organism responds differently to its environment.
2. The best type were knucklers because they were able to capture more food.
3. The population did evolve because knucklers grew in number while stumpies started to die off.
4. The environmental changes and placements of the food were random, but the traits that spred over time were not random. The population evolved depending on which traits were better suited to the random environmental changes.
5. The results would be different depending on the size of the food. For instance, if a lynx had little food but hares had lots, the hares would thrive a lot more for one generation because they would have more food and less predators.
6. If there was not incomplete dominance, then certain traits would not have survived at all.
7. Natural selection leads to evolution.
8. People started to cheat or use their hoodies to capture more food. The people who used strategies would have probably gotten more food than the people who did not, thus future populations would look more like the strategic people's organisms.
9. In evolution, POPULATIONS are what evolves. Natural selection acts on gphnotypes, because the best organisms with the best survival and reproductive phenotypes are the phenotypes which are passed down.
10. Can a strategic mindset be hereditary and be part of natural selection?

Monday, March 14, 2016

Progress With Plastics

I have learned how to make the bioplastics, what materials I need, and how much they will cost. I have also figured out how I am going to compost the samples. Unfortunately, I was sick for a whole week, so I was not able to make even further progress. The next step for me is to get my materials. I can apply the information to make my own bioplastics in the community by making plastics and showing others its usability and ability to biodegrade.

Friday, March 4, 2016

Bird Beak Lab


My first hypothesis was that if individuals with traits that help them survive better reproduce more, then there will be more of these individuals. The tweezers beak, the helpful trait, had 2-4 more chicks than the other types of beaks. This shows that individuals with better traits leave more offspring. 
My second hypothesis was "if better traits become more common over generations, then the organisms in the future generations will have more of these traits." In future generations, there are more tweezer-beaked birds because of how many more offspring birds with that trait have. This shows that populations begin to look more like the "winners."

For the second part of the lab, a new situation was introduced. We only had ten seconds instead of sixty to get food. We were asked "if natural selection occurs in a population, how do changes in selective pressures affect the evolution of that species?" My hypothesis was that if natural selection occurs in a population and tweezers did so well before, then tweezers will slowly become more dominant as other populations decrease even more. 
A possible error could be that we did not stop picking up food at exactly ten seconds. This could potentially cause certain birds to obtain more food and therefore more offspring that they actually would. To minimize this, people manning the beaks should be more attentive and fast to the end of ten seconds signal.
Another possible error could be desire to continue. One of my group members stopped trying, then started to try harder again a few trails later. This throws off the population and food obtained, going down then skyrocketing upward. To minimize this, group members should have enough respect for the lab to try continuously throughout the lab.
This lab was done to demonstrate a realistic model of natural selection. From this lab I learned that species that have traits better suited to their environment have more offspring, which helps me understand the concept of natural selection. Based on the information gained with this lab, I can see now that humans can greatly effect populations because of the new situations and environments that we can put them into.
.Image result for birds with weird beaks