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.

Overall Web Designer and Community Connections

In class we're making 2 things. One, a cookbook- only composed of Anti-Angiogenisis recipes...
Two, a website.  This website focuses on the systems throughout the body, and my group is doing a page of this site about the Deigestive System.  Everyone in each group has a job that is critical to the website and overall project.  My job is pretty much to keep everyone on track and to make sure that our website is always closer and closer to being finished, as well looking more and more beautiful as the design improves.  The second part of my job is to find a way to connect the community with what we are doing, and interview, or somehow incorporate locals into our website project.  Once this page is being finished, I'll post a link to show it off!! :)

Heck no H2O!!! (just kidding..)

This week in class we read a very interesting article about the amount of water we intake, and if it sometimes may be too much.  Living in a dry climate, I'm used to feeling like i need to be drinking more than I am or do, but after reading this article it made me feel a little differently.  It said that if we drink too much, also known as water intoxication.  If too much water if put into your system at one point, the kidneys can't handle that kind of hydration. Multiple medical researchers advise to only put as much water into your system as you put out in sweat.  However, living in a dry climate, it's sometimes hard to see how much you sweat given it seems to evaporate off semi-quickly, so they also advise to drink your thirst.  By doing this, you don't deprive your body from water in any way, but at the same time you don't OVER hydrate... As an athletic person, I took this article to heart, and am now more conscious about my water intake.  Whether it be drinking more or less than I am used to, I feel like this article helped me be more self-conscious.