Thursday, December 15, 2011

Christopher McDougall: Are We Born to Run?

Human beings have continually evolved over thousands of years. Many wonder and question researchers, "How did we survive in the 1600s and anytime before that?" The idea is that we simply were born to run.

-Native American Indians

Hid in Copper Canyon where they persevered through many years

Free from modern diseases and illnesses

If the oldest and first sharp object constructed specifically for weaponry originated 200,000 years ago, how did human beings survive before that?

-Ethiopian Woman Runs a Marathon

Hasn't ran in eight years

Recently nearly died in child birth

Kept up with a professional runners

-Women in the Olympics

"Too slow"

Body type not suitable for long-distance running

Woman finishes eighth in a forty-eight hour race

These examples give perfect reasoning to the idea that groups of human beings in early years hunted and survived like packs of wolves. We ran our prey to death. Groups of humans aging anywhere from twenty to eighty years old were chasing down dinner day by day. Running is a natural ability that replenishes pride in our ancestors' soul.

Interview with Dr. Ronald Evans

Hormones control the activity of genes Nuclewar hormone receptors are small genetic switches that control activites of networks of genes. Won Lasker Prize (American Nobel)

Julia Sweeney "The Talk"

Frogs Have Babies
-Females lay eggs
-Males fertilize eggs with sperm
-Eggs hatch into tadpoles that eventually grow to be frogs

Humans
-Males fertilize the egg inside of a female by realesing sperm from the penis into the vagina of a female.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Interview with Dr. Ronald Evans

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/obesity/evans_bio.html

In this interview, Dr. Evans discusses what steps he took in becoming a professor where he now works. He feels that his job in studying the sciences of fat, or obesity, is what got him interested. He feels that his job is not a job, but instead something that he loves to do, believing that work should be something that interests you. He runs a huge lab and his wife studies neuroscience, while his daughter mastered art history. He loves to travel with his family and doing what he is doing now.

Interview with Katherine Sorber

She studies the parasite involved with malaria to help make a new drug that will last more thatn 20 years. Shel uses DNA, RNA and proteins and uses alternative splicing to take out RNA and study the geonome.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/disease/interview_sorber.html

Learning from the Gecko's tail

Biomutalism is helping bilogist learn from engineering and nature. Gecko feet developed in a robert to climb on surfaces. The tail also acts as a 5th leg of stability and helps with air righting response. Together organisms and enviroment help perserve nature's design.

Ted Talk: Surgery's Past, Present and Robotic Future

Brain Surgery has been happening anywhere from 5,000-10,000 years ago with patients outliving surgery

Bronze Age: Surgery was merciless and more of a public spectacle

1847: Aneshesia was introduced, but as more infection arose

New innovations using sterile instruments dramatically reduced infection

1980's had new camera technological advances that allowed surgery to occur through several small incisions

The DaVinci Robot in the 1990s let major surgeries to occur through these small incisions with more precision and with more easily usable instruments

Limitations: Money and Training.

A brand new instrument has been innovated that goes into a single small insision using a tublelike instrument that has 3 tools and one camera inside

New instruments and dyes have been produced that allow surgeons to better find cancer and their paths within the body.

These New Surgeries leave you intact, competent, and fully functional

HHMI: Cancer interview with Dr. Bert Vogelstein

Born and Raised in Baltimore, choose medical school after grade school because of his affinity for math and science.

Researches Cancer in a lab

he enjoys experimentation in the lab more than pratical medical work

has 3 kids, loves to play raquetball and talk about himself

Choose to become a researcher because he tried treating patients but found that researching diseases was what he better enjoyed.

Interview with Chris Hittinger

Chris Hittinger was born in Indianapolis Indiana. At the age of around five he was greatly interested in Paleontology, and once he entered middle school he discovered the explaining power of genetics and was immediately intrigued. He Attended Southeast Missouri State University and he is now working on his finishing graduate school. Although has not completed college, he now experimenting with transcriptions factor that tell what genes to be expressed. He is now doing research in Dr. Carroll's lab with a group of very diverse scientist. His work in the lab is very independent to that of all the other scientist but it is mostly research based on answering basic evolutionary questions. He hopes to one day be able to contribute to the scientific community by developing a story that many will be interested in. He has many projects he hopes to complete before exiting graduate school but he aspires to one day run his own lab.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/evolution/hittinger_bio.html

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

TED Talk ; Can we make things that make themselves?

With our current technology we can manufacture a sky scraper within two and a half year that are made up of up to one million part. Yet we are not as efficient as many basic natural manufacturing systems such as in DNA replication which consists of three million parts yet can replicate in only and hour. What is even more intriguing about natural systems compared to artificial systems is that natural systems rarely commit errors. Through all the complexity natural systems are also able to repair themselves. This is where are future technology is should begin to deviate. We should decode the complexity of what we hope to build, we must create programmable parts that are able to reconfigure, we must have a source of energy to allow our system to be functional and we must create an error correction system of some sort to be able to create exactly what we want. With this new technology we can make things that simply make themselves.

Interview with Chris Hittinger

Chris Hittinger was born in Indianapolis Indiana. At the age of arounded five he was greatly interested in Paleontology, and one he entered middle school he discovered the explaining power of genetics and was immediately intrigued. He Attended Southeast Missouri State University and he is now working on his finishing graduate school. Although has not completed college, he now experimenting with transcriptions factor that tell what genes to be expressed. He is now doing research in Dr. Carroll's lab with a group of very diverse scientist. His work in the lab is very independent to that of all the other scientist but it is mostly research based on answering basic evolutionary questions. He hopes to one day be able to contribute to the scientific community by developing a story that many will be interested in. He has many projects he hopes to complete before exiting graduate school but he aspires to one day run his own lab.
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/evolution/hittinger_bio.html

Interview wtih Ronald Evans

He was born and raised in LA. He always knew science and math were his strengths. Went he went to grad school, his studies were to understand how hormones control genome. He use to "live" in the lab, but he loved it. Spent about 60-70 hours a week in there. He worked for Stark Institute(?) and had a series of experiments, his major interest, nuclear hormone receptor control activity of network of genes. His last award to get for basic medical research was the Lasker Prize. He described it as the American Noble Peace Prize. Two other colleges also got the award with him for these studies and the three understanding and discovering their experiments. He understood it was a great honor. He has a wife, Ellen who is also a scientist, and a daughter who is smart in math and science but an Art Major at Columbia University. They love to travel and ski. He doesn't look at science as his job but his life. He loves the challenge of understanding the unknown. It's an age old hunt for knowledge, making discoveries, its the ultimate challenge.

Amanda Hanzel Interview with Mumna Al Banchaabouchi

Mumna was born in Belgium to a Belgian mother and a Morrocan father, and stayed there until she finished primary school. They moved to Morroco where Her sister was born, and then they moved once again, back to Belgium. At that time, her mother died, and they finally moved back to Morroco with their father and she finished both hiatus hook and university there. She then got her BGDin Belgium and worked 3 and a half years in Puerto Roico.The death of her mother got her interested in one question: what is life? And that, in turn, lead her to science and how science broke down and attempted to newer that question. She was particularly interested in and would later work in animal biology and behavior. She is drawn to one very important fundamental of science: the quest for answers and how there is always question to answer even if you already answered a great deal of them, more wil be waiting.Only by going and doing science, she asserts, can you truly discover whether or not that field of study is for you. Her advice is to go out and do what you want.

Sheila Patek Clocks the Fastest Animals

In this video, Sheila Patek, a biologist addicted to measuring speeds of various animals, measures the speed of the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp is a small stomatopod which comes in two types, a spearer, which stabs to obtain its food and a smasher, which smashes with its heel to obtain its food. Their names tell it all. These shrimp move at incredible speeds as they quickly react to obtain their food. However, Patek struggled to record these speeds because they moved way to fast, even with the technology she had available at Berkeley where she was working/studying. Therefore, she teamed up with BBC to rent a high speed video system to record these incredible speeds in low light. They were able to slow it down 333x at 5000 frames per second to measure how fast the limb in the smasher mantis shrimp was moving to 'smash' its food. They discovered that it could lash at speeds up to 45 miles per hour in water! She also discovered that many techniques used by these stomatopods were used in architecture such as a saddle-shaped spring on the mantis shrimp. She as well discovered that they had a huge force output of generating over 200 lbs of force in such a small animal.

Mumna Al Banchaabouchi

Dr. Mumna Al Banchaacouchi, researcher in the Mouse Phenotyping Core at EMBL in Monterotondo Italy, gives her ultimate philosophical phrase "It's only by going and doing science that [either] a, you really like it and want to continue it, or [b], science is not your suit". She expresses her views on science throughout her life as it takes geographic and emotional twists and turns.

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/media/mumna_bio-lg.mov

Amanda Hanzel Dragonflies

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/charles_anderson_discovers_dragonflies_that_cross_oceans.html

Charles Anderson is a marine biologist and spends a massive amount of his time diving in the ocean and observing the life there. However, while he spent time in the Maldives, he noticed a strange phenomenon, dragonflies whose normal life span is about a year, ten to eleven of which is spent in water as larva, come in a huge wave every year to the Maldives in October. The strange thing about this is that the Maldives is a grouping of islands that are made entirely of coral reefs, sand, and some plants. The water there soaks into the ground and there is no water above ground besides the ocean. Dragonflies need standing fresh water for their larva and therefore, the dragonflies cannot breed there. The monsoon was also in the southwest part and so, how could they come to the Maldives from India, against the winds? He compared dates of when they arrived in India and down the archipelago of the Maldives, and sure enough, they had to be coming from India. How was this possible? It turns out that the monsoons are actually always present and they form a crease in between them. When it is in the southwest monsoon the northeast monsoon, the winds that blow from India down to the Maldives is still present at a higher altitude. The dragonflies were actually coming in on the northeast monsoon at an altitude of 1000 to 2000 meters. Why? Because, they're actually on a journey in search of new breeding grounds. By following the wind, the dragonflies are following the seasonal rains because wind always converges to where the rain is. The result of this is that these dragonflies, in four generations, travel a complete circuit of the Indian Ocean and other creatures follow them. Some examples of these animals are: Amor Falcons, and Eurasian Rollers, both of which are birds that migrate with the same winds and eat insects like dragonflies.

Ted Talks- Craig Venter and Synthetic Life

Craig Venter and his colleagues have created synthetic life!

His team first took bacterial phage Phix 174 and sequenced all 5000 base pairs with a coding program and debugging tool. From there, they split into two teams dedicated to two tasks; one solving the chemical makeup of large DNA molecules and one working on the "biological boot up". The harder of the two parts, the boot up, was focused on by using yeast to promote plasma genesis gene genome synthesis. However, yeast transplanted genomes did not boot up cells, so they methalated the genome (added methyl groups to the gene). They also removed the restriction enzyme from the recipient bacteria that would normally eat up the engineered gene.

Now they had a way to genetically engineer their own genes and transplant them into bacteria. So they did just that. They made a 500,000 base pair genetic code for the new bacteria that would include a coded intron that contained the names of all the authors and a website available to email for those that decode the genetic code-- as a watermark. This new bacteria self replicates and is classified as having a parent as a computer. The future for this technology will hopefully stem to solving problems such as virus mutations where genetic engineering can predict the environmental changes that would normally be applied to the virus and produce a vaccine for the predicted mutated virus to be seen later. This also may be used in engineering such organisms such as algae that can metabolize oil in environmental clean ups.

Ted Talks: Edith Widder, The Weird, Wonderful World of Bioluminescence

She talks about how most animals make life. Imagine how much life is in the ocean that many people don't see in their life. She had the opportunity to go down in a sub(I don't know if it was a submarine or something really close to it. I can't remember what she called it.) and she saw amazing animals that live only deep in the ocean. She saw a single celled alga(sp?) and it produced an amazing light. These types of animals produced this light to defend itself, like a scream for help, but also to attract mates. She recommends if you get the chance to see down in the deep sea, to do it. At the bottom there are weird things. She saw a golden coral that glows and it could be about 3000 yrs old. When you touch it, you get a twinkling bluegreen glow on you. She says it all seems like things out of a Dr. Seuss book. There are some fish, brittle stars that have bangs of light that change colors. An animal that looks like plant that blows up on its stock and when you squeeze the stock it changes colors from blue to green. She works to copy these type of animals with technology with 16 blue LEDs. Its an imitating display. Call it an optical allure electronic jellyfish. They sent it down and got to "talk" with animals. They don't know what they are saying,but its amazing. It also brought in a shark, which they don't know why. It's just the beginning of understanding these strange creatures. 99% of the earth is ocean living space. These are aliens life forms that you don't have to go to another planet to see.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edith_widder_the_weird_and_wonderful_world_of_bioluminescence.html

Interview with Audra Pompeani

Exploring Biodiversity: Search for New Medicines

Audra is a 6 year graduate student that has been in Bonnie’s lab for 5 years and her research is over Real RVI which is bio menecent(spelling?)ocean bacteria. Real RVI listens to signals around it to say that there are this many bacteria around like it or this many that are different, telling it to turn on light or regulate certain behaviors. Coming from Pittsburg, Pompeani played a lot of sports. In her third or fourth year of college she decided to pursue research and go to graduate school. Loving that in this section nobody knows the right answer and that you can ask any questions, amazes her and gender is not an issue. She wants to change the message to children that women are as smart to men. She wants to go to veterinary school and combine research on bacterial infection with clinical treatment of dogs, cats, and companion animals and the bacteria that pass between humans and pet. Advice for high school students would be to keep your options open, get into a lab if you feel like you want to be in science or research. You never know if you don’t try it.

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/biodiversity/Pompeani_bio.html

Jack Horner: Building a dinosaur from a chicken

In Jurassic Park they say that to “bring back” the dinosaur you can find a mosquito in amber, take the DNA from it, clone it and insert it into an ostrich egg and you would have a dinosaur. In reality you would perhaps have more mosquitoes or trees. There is no need to “bring back” the dinosaur because birds are dinosaurs. Labeled as Avian Dinosaurs, birds have a few same characteristics as dinosaurs found out through Mary Schweitzer’s work on B-Rex which had the same medullary tissue as a pregnant bird has; linking birds and dinosaurs. Jack Horner has researched the specific genes in birds that turn off the “teeth gene”, “tail gene” or “hand gene” that has evolved them from the ancient dinosaurs. His research is on his work to turn those genes back on to make the “Chickensaurus”.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_the_beautiful_tricks_of_flowers.html

There are a fourth a million speiceis of flowers and just as much variation in pollen. These plants have to find a way to spread their pollen because that is how they reproduce. Some pollen is trasported by wind but that is not the smart way to do it. Most plant trick insects to carrying it. Flowers have adapted to look like insects, look like other plants, be certain colors, and certain temperatures.

She moved from Isreal when she was 15 majored in chemistry and minored in math. She decided she wanted to do lab work so the went back to grad school so she could work in Jeffs lab studying obesity. She went to a possition in pharmisudical company and is able to still work on obesity.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Collin Rodgers... Interview With Dr. Jeffrey Friedman

Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Friedman

Growing up on Long Island with a strong expectation to be a doctor from his family, Friedman ended up going to medical school. He studied a genetically obese mouse that weights 3 times the normal mouse and carries 5 times the amount of fat as a normal mouse. He questioned how a single defected gene could lead a mouse to become so morbidly obese. Later, he identified the gene as leptin in May, 1994. Leptin was found to be the gene that regulates food intake and body weight. He believes that the root cause of obesity lies in biological differences between people, as opposed to lifestyle choices. In his interview, he said that the favorite part of his job is the sense of discovery and excitement from his research.

-Collin Rodgers

Collin Rodgers TED Talk... Christopher McDougall: Are We Born to Run?

Christopher begins this discussion by providing a heartwarming story of the New York City Marathon, in which an Ethiopian woman leads the race but falls back to aid an injured runner on two separate occasions throughout the race. Even after providing a helping hand two different times, the woman still manages to win the race. After this, Christopher goes on to describe an Indian tribe located in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. This tribe has lived unchanged lives for over 400 years in the canyons, living extremely healthy lifestyles consisting of 70-80 year old individuals running insane distances without injuries or disease. He provides statistics that shows our athletic peak is reached at about 27 years of age, and slowly begins to decline over the next 45 years. He then poses 3 questions. How did humans kill animals for food before they had weapons? Why is it women who run get stronger as distances get longer? Why is it that 60-70 year olds run at the same efficiency as when they were 19? He proposes the solution that humans have possibly evolved from hunting pack animals. Older individuals are needed for their expertise, while the ones in their 20's are used for power and killing the animal, while the teenagers are there to learn the ropes. He proposes the idea of running for joy and pleasure in order to get away from modern injuries and become more like the healthy Indian tribe he described.

-Collin Rodgers

Friday, December 9, 2011

Quote!

Life of a Slug:

First you are homeless,
then people pour salt on you,
then you die.

Monday, November 21, 2011

synthetic life

we watched this in class

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Do you watch storm chasers?

Reed Timmer is our keynote speaker at the science teacher nerd convention!

Thursday, November 10, 2011

AP Bio Humor

"You make my heart beat like a Daphnia!" - true love, by Collin

Friday, October 28, 2011

Rules of probability

Tacky tourists

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Cell Repiration Music Video

Monday, September 26, 2011

Sodium-Potassium Pump Animation and more ....

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072495855/student_view0/chapter2/animation__how_the_sodium_potassium_pump_works.html

Tis is the animation we watched in class. Along the left hand side there are other animations that apply to your notes, please view all of them. This is for your benefit.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Lab Results

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Diffusion & Osmosis Lab

Tell me one thing you learned from the online lab today. Don't repeat someone else's!

Monday, September 12, 2011

Enzyme Lab

All suited up

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Enzyme animations

Videos from class today (each has a quiz below it)

How enzymes work

Enzyme Action & Hydrolysis of Sugar

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

New Year, New Authors

You are welcome to make up an alias for your posts. You have not been assigned any posts yet. I will let you know when there are assignments. Think before you post!