Blog 5: Intelligence

It is important to define and debate about the understanding of intelligence because like we discussed in class, there are many types of intelligence. It ranges from having a visual intelligence to one that is spiritual. Everybody has their own way of learning, the way we define intelligence cannot simply mean one thing, it has several different meanings because the word intelligence is different to everybody. For me, I am definitely strong in math so to know how I learn as a student makes it easier for me to find ways to adapt to other teaching strategies that I experience in class. It's good to know the intelligence's origins because like in the genome book we can compare it to nature vs. nurture and how we got to that intelligence. Knowing the type of intelligence you have is important because you as a student should know what is best fitted for you and how you learn the best. This relates to me because, as I have said before I am a math learning person. I have to do things step by step or else I'll get confused, knowing this I know how to approach the way I learn and how a teacher teaches. The AP test is coming up and I realize that I have to begin to use my intelligences to the max to save myself and pass the AP test.

Kidney Function Mindmap

Blog 4: Nephron

Nephrons and blood vessels that are associated in the process are the functional units of mammal kidney. A nephron consists of a single long tubule and a ball of capillaries called the glomerulus. Each human kidney has about a million nephrons. Excretory tubules that contains nephrons and collecting ducts and associated blood vessels are packed inside the kidney. Fluid from several nephrons flows into a collecting duct and from there a ureter conveys urine from the renal pelvis to the urinary bladder. The nephrons control the composition of the blood by filtration, secretion, and re-absorption. The counter current system present in the loop of henle is able to dilute or concentrate urine depending on what the body needs. In the descending limb, ions such as salts has very little permeability, only water is permeable here. The water moves by osmosis into the hyper osmotic interstitial fluid and salt diffuses out of the concentrated filtrate as t moves through the salt-permeable ascending limb of the loop of Henle.

SOURCES: Campbell book
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/human-biology/kidney.htm

Blog 3: Starfish

Starfishes are found in the phylum enchinoderms. In this phylum we can also find feather stars, starfish, sea urchins, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, sand dollars and sea lilies. Starfish have radial symmetry, sometimes bilateral.They are sessile or slow-moving animals. The internal and external parts of the animal radiate from the center, which are often five spokes. A thin skin covers an endoskeleton of hard calcareous plates. Their body has more than two cell layers which has the tissues and the organs. Their body cavity is a true coelom. Most of them possess a through gut with an anus. Although we can see a starfishes' five arms we have no way of telling which one is the head. Their nervous system includes a circum-oesophageal ring. What is unique is their water vascular system. This is a network of hydraulic canals branching into extensions called the tube feet that function in locomotiom, feeding, and gas exchange. They have an open circulatory system but it is poorly defined. Sexual reproduction for these creatures usually involves separate male and female individuals that release their gametes into the seawater. This is known to be external fertilzation. The radial adults develop by metamorphosis from bilateral larvae. These creates do not have excretory organs, rather they rely on counter current exchange. Starfish are often a pest of commercial clam and oyster beds, a single Starfish my eat over a dozen oysters or young clams every day.

Crinoidea:

Ophiocistioidea:

Astroidea:

Echinoiudea:

Holothuoidea:

SOURCES: http://www.earthlife.net/inverts/echinodermata.html
Campbell textbook.

GENOME Entry #5: Chromosome 13 - Pre- history

Matt Ridley first begins with saying how there is a similarity of embryological genes in worms, flies, chicks, etc and this shows that there is a common descent among this species because of DNA. He makes a comparison of this to human languages, and how by comparing the vocabularies of human languages we can find out their common ancestry, just like how we are look at embryonic history right now. In the 1980s Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza wondered if linguistic similarities coincide with genetic ones. By gathering data on the common, known variations in simple genes and doing clever statistical tricks called principal components analysis with the resulting data, Cavalli-Sforza uncovered five different contour maps of gene frequencies within Europe. In a study with chromosome 1 that has the gene lactase, the evidence suggests that such people took up a pastoral way of life first and developed milk-digesting ability later in response to it. This provides an example of a cultural change leading to an evolutionary.

GENOME Entry #4: Chromosome 9 - Disease

Chromosome 9 has the gene that determines a person's ABO blood group. A blood transfusion can go horribly wrong if one does not get the same type of blood. The red cells will all stick together. O blood type is the universal donor, people with blood type AB can only receive blood from A or B or both. A and B are co-dominant versions of the same gene while O is considered to be recessive. It was not until 1990 that this gene was discovered. From diseases like malaria was able to create a link between disease and mutations. It has been shown that people with blood type O seem to be more resistant to malaria than people of other blood types. Different diseases seem to be more resistant to some blood types and others not so much. From an ABO blood group we are able to tell which diseases apply to their genes. The ABO blood group is different for everybody and thus it's function is different for everybody else as well.

GENOME Entry #3: Chromosome 5 - Environment

Chromosome 5 is the home of several of the leading candidates for the title of the asthma gene. Asthma has proved to be impossible to pin down in genes because everybody in the world at some point has gotten asthma or has had some kind of allergy in their life. The author ends up comparing asthma to real life. He says that Asthma, eczeme, allergies are all caused by the same 'mast' cells in the body which are alerted and triggered by the same immunoglobulin-E molecules. The author is making the claim that it is because of pollution that there is an increase in asthma for people. The theory goes that dirt contains bacteria, especially mycobacteria, which stimulate one part of the immune system, whereas routine vaccination stimulates a different parts of the immune system. This goes to show that environment does impact how a person lives. Based on where they live, when people rarely travel and travel to a place where there is new viruses and bacteria, they are most likely to catch it because their immune system has never blocked anything like that and therefore they do not have the protection that they need unlike the natives that live there.

GENOME Entry #2: Chromosome 4 - Fate

In the beginning of this chapter, we are told that genes are there to cause diseases and that we cannot escape from our fate. The author gives us the example of Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome where the disases depends on the number of "CAG" that repeats in the DNA. The age at which the madness will appear depends on the number of repetitions of the word CAG in one place in one gene. It was not until the discovery of Huntington's diasese that the first completely dominant genetic disease came to the light. In the 1970's a woman went Venezuela where much of the people were thought to have Huntington's disease. The doctor and her began to conduct research on the topic and it was not until 1993 that they found out the gene was found on chromosome 4. We learned that some families seem to be more prone to the Huntington's mutation than others, but that is because it depends on the simple matter of letters in their gene and how it is matched. The way it is close together determines how CAGs can add up and repeat. The chapter has a good way of explaining that we can't escape from our fate, that we are given what we are given because hereditary diseases like these are inescapable, it's in our genes.

Blog 2: Double Fertilization

Flowering plants have the ability to reproduce asexually and sexually. When they do produce sexually, they undergo a process called double fertilization. A flowering plant has a female part and male part if they are a perfect flower. The female part consists of the stigma, style, ovary, and ovule, while the male parts consist of the stamen, that has the anther and the filament. We first begin with what happens in the female part of the flower, the ovule has a reproductive cell called the megaspore (the cell is a diploid and undergoes meiosis and produces 4 haploid spores). In most cases, 3 of the haploid spores degenerate and only leave one. The remaining haploid spore goes through 3 rounds of mitotic division and produces 8 haploid nuclei. Then, cell walls form between the nuclei and 3 nuclei move up while 3 move towards the ovule the remaining two stay in the middle and are called polar nuclei. Now begins the processes in the male parts of the flower, pollen grain lands on the stigma and begins to germinate and sends a long pollen tube through the style and ovary. The cell that traveled through the tube undergoes mitosis and produces 2 haploid sperm cells. One of the sperm cells fertilizes with the egg producing a zygote and the other sperm combines with the polar nuclei making a triploid which later becomes the endosperm. The endosperm provids food for the embryo.

Sources: http://bcs.whfreeman.com/thelifewire/content/chp39/3902001.html

GENOME Entry #1: Chromosome 1 - Life

The chapter of life begins with the author saying that in the beginning was the word, and that this word "proselytised the sea with it's message, copying itself unceasingly and forever". We see the life is something that is not easily defined, but it does have two very different skills. Life has the ability to replicate and the ability to create order. How do we human beings create order you ask? Well that can be answered by the example Matt Ridley used in the book. Living things have the ability to produce approximate copies of themselves and we eat and from there we transform it into flesh. After this we are somehow able to build bodies of order and complexity from the random chaos in the world. Why is this important? It's important because it leads to the the most important thing that contains our information--DNA. DNA contains a record of the word that transmits through all aeons to the present. With all this genetic information, we ask ourselves the question which came first? the RNA or the DNA? just like how we ask ourselves which came first? the chicken or the egg. Studies have shown that there is more proof to back up that RNA came first. Without RNA we would not be able to do the most primitive and basic functions in a cell and this is how life began.

Extra Credit Blog: Reflection on First Semester

What topics really confused you?
The topic of reproduction confuses me quite a bit. I don't remember much about meiosis and mitosis when reproduction cycles come in.

What topics do you feel very clear on?
I know chemistry and the cell chapters pretty well.

What lab/ activity was your favorite? Why?
I enjoyed the photosynthesis one because I was able to see which types of colors are absorbed better and I got a better understanding as to why those are absorbed the best. I also like the enzyme lab because after doing all the tests for which enzyme works better or fails in each environment I was able to reflect what I remembered and saw in the essay for the final.

What lab/activity was your least favorite? Why?
My least favorite lab was probably the bacteria lab because I was not able to see any traces of how the bacteria shape was supposed to look under the microscope. I got really frustrated from this lab.

If you could change something about the class to make it better, for instance the type of homework (not the amount) what would it be and why?
What I would change about the class is probably lessen the amount of computer work. I feel that when I write more of the stuff down, like notes from the textbook. I absorb the material better. When things are done online I usually just skim it and don't get the full reading like I do when I do the reading from the book.