If it doesn't fizz, SPIT IT OUT.

A hot topic in the drug world these days, and still on the rise: methamphetamine.  Methamphetamine, or meth, can ruin, change and potentially kill people.  Even trying this sucker-hole of a drug is too much.  The high or buzz people claim to get from this drug is like feeling energized, focused, more sexual prowess and overall confidence.  After the first time using this drug however, the amount that needs to be taken in order to get this feeling increases each time, leading to an easy addiction.  Ironically, after becoming addicted to meth you become less focused, energized, and sexually appealing.  Meth consists of everyday legal ingredients such as rat poison, brake fluid, cleaning fluids, battery acid and even diet aids.  When mixed together and cooked though, this can become a deadly, deadly substance.  Meth effects the dopamine in our brain.  At first it sends a splurge of dopamine to the body, causing us to feel pleasure and euphoria, but after time the dopamine receptors in the brain are destroyed, making it nearly impossible to feel pleasure.  When the feeling of the euphoria and pleasure first wears off, users have admitted to feeling depressed and self-conscious, with an automatic response to want to take more meth to feel how they once did.  Meth also makes the brain release large amounts of adrenaline when used, causing the user to "tweak." When tweaking on a meth binge, many users have been known to have obsessive behavior causing them to do things that they would never have done sober, such as dumpster diving, collecting random items in alleys and from the thrown-out items from stores.  These large levels also help to contribute to the after-effects of meth on users.  Most ex-meth users have been found to have violent behavior partly due to the uneven levels of adrenaline the brain had been exerting.  One of the other behaviors that have been found in heavy ex-meth users is psychotic behavior including; aggression, paranoia, delusions and hallucinations.  

To read more, go to this website:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/body/#1

A new form of meth is now known as "Strawberry Quick." Strawberry quick is a dark pink color much like the candy Pop Rocks and smells like strawberries.  Not only does this new form of meth come in strawberry, but also peanut butter, chocolate, grape, mango and countless other "flavors."  There is a rise in teens and pre-teens who are tricked into taking this form of meth thinking it is the harmless candy.  So a quick note to all, "If it doesn't fizz in your mouth... SPIT IT OUT!" Because it just might be crystal meth.  

Pop Rocks

Crystal Meth

Blood, D.N.A. and Tape... OH MY!

For our final project in Biology this year, we worked with exonerating innocent people from jail with DNA testing.  In order to complete the project we did multiple lab activities in order to get a good idea of how to fully understand and represent D.N.A. testing.  One of the lab activities was creating a "DNA necklace." This DNA necklace was made from taking cheek cells from our mouth and completing a process in order to separate the DNA markers from the rest of the DNA and use these to then be mixed with a Lysis Buffer.  With this solution, the DNA clung together like a small string, and floated to the middle of the solution in the small vile.  We could then wear this vile around like a necklace with our DNA floating inside.  Another main lab we did was an Electrophoresis Gel kit.  This kit was more time consuming than the necklaces and took two days to complete.  The process was to set a gel solution with Agarose Gel, let it harden (which only too a couple minutes) then take the four different DNA samples and inject them into the four slots made in the Gel.  A solution was poured over the hard gel so when injecting the DNA into these slots you could see the DNA glide down through it and lay on top of the hardened gel. We then hooked up a positive and negative energy flow to the gel causing the DNA markers to move through the gel littlest to biggest until in got to its secure spot inside of the gel.  After the DNA was securely in its spot, we poured out the liquid layer on top and let the DNA sit overnight.   The next day we added a dye to the gel, making the DNA turn bright blue.  We washed this out a few times to get all of the remaining dye out of the actual gel, then we had our final product of our moved DNA! New DNA technologies are what allow for the DNA testing that is taking place today to be able to happen.  Whether that be through electrophoresis gel or semen testing or even fingerprint analyzing, the distance we have come with testing is remarkable and has helped hundreds of innocent convicts get out of jail.

 So far in the United States there have been 269 people exonerated from jail due to D.N.A. testing.  In our classes we were put into groups of 2-3 people and in these groups we chose a name off of the list of exonerated people, then focus our project on them.  We chose a random name on that list; James Bain.  As it turns out though, James Bain was in jail the longest out of anyone who has ever been wrongfully convicted... 3 years! He was convicted for taking a 9-year-old boy to a baseball field and raping him.  When the boy was describing his attacker to his uncle, he mentioned how the man had had bushy sideburns, and the uncle said that that sounded like James Bain.  In the line-up at the station the detective specifically told the boy to pick out "Mr. Jimmy Bain," James Bain had no prior criminal record, just an unfortunate shared characteristic with the man who did attack the 9-year-old boy.  Our class made tape-sculptures to represent each exoneration victim we chose.  For our tape sculpture we had it in a laying down position to show the time that passed in jail and how sad and slightly helpless he felt there.  The painted on shirt was the same shirt that James Bain wore right after he got out of jail saying "NOT GUILTY!" Another aspect we chose to put on our sculpture was bushy sideburns; of course like the ones that had once unfairly set him aside in this case.  After serving his lengthy 35 years in jail, James Bain came out more insightful and charismatic as before.  He was excited to see his family and start from where he left off as a 19 year old boy.  The government gave Bain over 1.7 million dollars in 2010 for compensation.

This unit taught me all about the criminal "justice" system, and how in a lot of ways it can be really unjustified.  It also showed me how DNA testing and the new breakthroughs it has made has freed 269 people in the US just in the past thirty years.  I also learned how to do the actual DNA testing and make learn how to not make mistakes when doing this as to keep the results clear and perfect.  I think that I connected to this project from the tape sculptures we did.  This was an easy way to make a fun representation of DNA exoneration.  I also connected to this project through all of the stories we heard from people who had gotten out of jail after so many years of serving unnecessary time.  I am proud of the work my group and I completed, the tape sculptures were not easy, but we pulled through and created a really great sculpture as well as slideshow on James Bain.  Next time I would spend more time perfecting the slideshow and also work to patch all of the small holes on our sculpture.  It looked fine, but if we wanted perfect quality we were just an arms length from it due to computer issues on the night of exhibition.  For the nect project like this I will be sure to take every second of my free time to refine my project as much as I can and be sure to make it as high quality as possible. 

Our video to narate our project is below:

Pesky Little Fruit Flies...

For our next ongoing project in Biology we worked with hundreds of fruit flies, or Drosophila.  We sorted them, chose the ones we wanted to cross breed, put those in a vial together with mashed potatoes and yeast, then let the magic happen! About two weeks later we looked at the offspring of these flies, recorded the totals, then did the same with a new group of people and fruit flies.  This was a more controlled experiment the second time and as a class we had really successful results.  After all this we wrote up our conclusions and class data.  This project was really interesting, and even though it seemed to go on for QUITE A LONG TIME it was worth it and I now know the real-world-application of breeding fruit flies!

Gregor Mendel and... Belgian Blue's

Gregor Mendel was the founding father of many heredity theories.  Thirty-forty years before his time, he started experimenting with pea plants seeing the way that they could make cross breeds of specific plants, leading him to his passions in animal hereditary.  You could say Gregor Mendel changed the way we live today.

Today almost everything from potatoes to rabbits are genetically enhanced and altered.  Including chicken. The difference between selective breeding and genetic modification is key.

Selective Breeding is when breeders take a certain desired trait in an animal or plant and breed the best of the best of that trait until the family tree passes down the most intense and concentrated form of what you want to breed out of it.  For example, the Belgian Blue Cow.  This animal is like the body-builder form of an animal, the most muscle mass has been bred out of these cows for hundreds of years until they get the product of a cow weighing over a ton.

Genetic Modification, or engineering, is when scientists take a trait not always home to the targeted organism, and places it into the desired animal or plant.  It is the insertion of genetic material into a genome, this genetic information is then copied and replaced.  An example of this would be almost all of the produce we see in our grocery stores.  The food we see there wasn't nearly that size before it was genetically modified to be tens of times bigger than it originally was, or even a different plant in other ways too.  Tomatoes obtain a trait found in flounder that enable it from freezing in the cold oceanic waters, as to not freeze during cold nights or months.

Some benefits of selective breeding are the dog breeds we have today, not all those breeds used to exist until we selectively bred them to be what they are today.  Another benefit is that we can now control and better understand specific parts of a genome and traits of an organism, target these and selective breed them, or target it and attack it.

Some benefits of genetic modification would be that we have the foods that we do today.  We would not have the same types, vastness, or quantity as we do now without genetic modification.

Some concerns with them would be that after selectively breeding these things so much can really hurt and damage the organism.  The same diseases and bad qualities are passed down with the breeding too, not just the desired traits.  In animals, we breed them mostly for larger size, but this means that the bones have to support more body mass, and the heart has to supply a larger body now too, and in most cases, these animals are suffering and living short lives due to this.  Heart failure and lameness are one of the main contributors.

Genetic enhancing and manipulation is not any better.  These organisms are becoming more of a pain than anything, with all of the illnesses spread down it is hardly worth the special crops of organisms. These GM's are posing negative health impacts and unhealthy cross-pollination as well as many other negative controversies.

I think that GM's should be more concerning to the public because, especially recently, scientists are testing on animals and organisms for unnecessary reasons.  Rabbits for example.  Scientists have taken a trait from jelly-fish and inserted it into animals to make them "glow." I think that at least cross breeding sticks with the raw materials given, but in GM we are messing with intermixing whole different families of living things.  A tomato and bottom crawler fish should not be mixed.  In this way I think that we are just messing with nature a bit too much, and it is dangerous, much of the time unnecessary, as well is causing more animal testing than I think is moral.

If Gregor Mendel saw our current day hereditary studies and changes we have made I think he would be shocked.  He started out experimenting on pea plants, not jelly fish and rodents.  He would probably be impressed with himself for starting this whole evolution of science, and think that we have taken this further than he ever expected to.  Hopefully he would be able to tell the difference between what we have done and what he started out with doing, and also I hope that he would be able to see how far we have come, as well as being able to see or tell people what he thought of current day involvement with hereditary studies.

A World Without Mosquitoes... finally!!!

Although some (including myself) might think that having a world without mosquitoes would be pure luxury, however after reading an article about this hypothetical theory makes me change my thinking.  Not that having no mosquitoes would directly effect humans, but it would greatly effect us with some of the fish and animals we consume dying off or becoming replaced.  The way it would effect us directly though is that current diseases would hiccup and get better for a short while until something new and possibly worse would come along.  Altogether having a world without these pesky insects although quite peaceful, could potentially irreversibly alter our ecosystem as we know it, and not for the better...

Along with reading this packet of information we also listened to a sixty second podcast.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=why-ecosystem-services-matter-09-02-05

What I got out of this podcast is not only are a lot of humans unaware of how fragile our ecosystem is in many ways, but also their lack of care.  At AHS I and a friend are the only recyclers in the school, meaning we take the small amount of recycles that people put in bins, sort it, and take it down to the recycling center.  I've always been keen on trying to make the world a better place in instances like this where something so simple as recycling can do so much.  Plastics are made up of materials that take up to 70,000 years to be created, and then are used once, and sent to landfills.  Things like this really make me angry at the world for not caring about since if they did they would start to take better care of something so precious that needs to be looked after.  I don't think people fully consider and understand all that the natural world does for us and itself, just as the podcast talks about.  Something that you may not think of like bees getting wiped out would hugely alter and effect everything in our ecosystem.  Bees account for pollination effecting the plants which contribute to photosynthesis and the air we breathe, effecting us... not to mention, no more honey! So if the population starts to pay more attention on maintaining a small ecological footprint, little by little small things can start to alter in a good way on Earth.

Pump-pump-pump-pump-pumps your blood!!

This is the video we watched to learn how blood travels through your heart.

LYRICS:

Pump, pump, pumps your blood.


 The right atriums where the process begins,

where the CO2 blood enters the heart.


Through the tricuspid valve, to the right ventricle, the pulmonary artery, and lungs.


Once inside the lungs, it dumps its carbon dioxide and picks up its oxygen supply.


Then its back to the heart through the pulmonary vein, through the atrium and left ventricle.


Pump, pump, pumps your blood.

Pump, pump, pumps your blood.


Verse 2:

The aortic valves, where the blood leaves the heart,

then it's channeled to the rest of the bod.


The arteries, arterioles, and capillaries too

bring the oxygenated blood to the cells.


The tissues and the cells trade off waste and CO2,

which is carried through the venules and the veins.


Through the larger vena cava to the atrium and lungs,

and we're back to where we started in the heart.


Pump, pump, pumps your blood.

Testing on Chimps...

This week in class we learned all about how chimpanzees, the animals most similar to humans, are being tested on for cures to assorted diseases.  A lot of these chimps are started off being raised to do other kinds of experimentation, such as learning sign language, or studied for their habits in behavior, emotions, and brain stimuli.  The sad part is though; many, many of these animals are then sent to a facility that infects them with Hepatitis C and HIV and uses them to try out cures for this disease given that they are the closest we can get to humans by similarity.  Not only is this method for coming up with a cure heartbreaking for these animals, but also seemingly is collecting incorrect data.  If they really wanted to test these possibly cures out, they would do it in a way where the chimps socialized with one another as well as being exposed to the outdoors.  People who are really sick with these viruses are not quarantined or kept in full seclusion from everything as these chimps are having to be, but they are out and getting exposed to other things as well that may change the virus.  So all in all, i think that animal testing in itself is horrible, and doing it on animals like Chimpanzees is even more horrible given that they have so much more to offer the world than being cooped up in a box poked and prodded with needles everyday.