Polar Bears and Global Warming

I saw this picture in a funny website a while ago. I didn't think much into it, but now after watching "And Inconvenient Truth", I understand that this is a serious issue.

Global warming is causing ice caps and glaciers to melt, therefore leaving no place for the polar bears to live in. These poor animals have to swim around to find a place to rest, and sometimes when they can't find one, they drown out of exhaustion.

Happy Earth Day!!

Earth Day is a day designed to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. It's a good day to give something back to the Earth, which has provided us with so much.
So... How are you supposed to celebrate Earth Day? Well, here are some ideas:

Plant a tree!
Not only will it cheer your garden up, but in the long run, planting trees helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cleans pollution, secures soil in place to prevent erosion, and provides homes for a lot of biodiversity.

Separate your trash
Before you dump everything into one bin, separate your trash by organic, plastic, paper, metal, and glass. Dispose of each in a environmentally thoughtful way!

Feed the Birds
Buy or build a bird feeder. Birds play an important role in every ecosystem, so make sure they are getting food. A fun idea to do if you have kids is to take a pine cone, put some peanut butter and roll it in on bird seeds. Attach a ribbon and hang in a place where birds can have access too. Kids love crafts, and getting them involved with nature is very important.

Learn about the environment
How about instead of checking your comments in Myspace, you read some articles about the environment? Google is your best friend. Some topics could be learning to reduce your carbon footprint, issues such as pollution, endangered species, water shortages, recycling, and climate change. Or, learn about a region you've never considered before, like the Arctic, the deserts, or the rain forests.

Car Pool or Walk
For most of us walking to school or work is difficult (not impossible though!), but we can carpool. Also, just use your car for long distances. Walk or ride your bike if you're going somewhere nearby.

Cook an Eco-Friendly Meal
Try doing a vegetarian recipe. Factory farming does a great deal of harm to the environment. If people ate vegetarian or vegan for one day a week, we could help the environment and our health. This website has tons of vegan and vegetarian recipes. If not, then try eating organic. Organic food doesn't have pesticides and is much healthier and easier on the environment than mass produced vegetables and animals.

So there are some great ideas for today. But don't forget, we can make everyday be Earth Day!

Plants in Bedroom: Dangerous?

I remember hearing that having plants in your bedroom, or at least at night, was dangerous. Why? Because plants compete for oxygen while you sleep, eventually causing you to suffocate to death. (Wow, how tragic of me, haha!)

Truth or Myth?

Myth! Plants are continuously engaging in cellular respiration, but can only photosynthesize during the day (they need light!). However, during the day, the amount of oxygen plants release as part of photosynthesis makes the amount of oxygen they consume for respiration seem so small as to be meaningless.

At night, when photosynthesis can’t happen, plants continue to consume oxygen but they don’t release any back into the room. "So plants really do compete with humans for oxygen?!"

Well, not really. The amount of oxygen the plants use at night is still minimal to even be able to take our share of available oxygen.

Bacteria Population

Last week during lab, we got to test any object of our choice to see the bacteria it had. I thought it would be a great idea if I tested the door handle. I usually avoid touching public doors, especially restroom doors, because of the amount of people who touch them.

Maybe my expectations were too high, so today during lab I faced a huge disappointment:

Dramatization

But when I was done being upset of my sad little petri dish, I realized something: either I didn't test it right or the door handle is actually clean. Assuming I did test it right (which I'm sure I did), then the door is clean. Happiness!

Although I would have liked a nasty bacteria culture like the one from my classmate who tested the pencil sharpener. That was just gross, but very cool to look at!

Sauerkraut

On Tuesday, Professor Hotchkin made sauerkraut during lab. And today the class got to try it. I thought it was pretty good, although the smell was very strong. Definitely sour, and kinda lemony in a way (which may have just been me, because it doesn't have lemon).

It has a long shelf-life and a distinctive sour flavor, both of which result from the lactic acid that forms when the bacteria ferment the sugars in the cabbage.

Sauerkraut is very healthy. It is an excellent source of vitamin C, lactobacilli, and other nutrients. However, the low pH and abundance of otherwise healthy lactobacilli may upset the intestines of people who are not used to eating acidic foods. Studies suggest that fermented cabbage may be even more healthy than the raw vegetable, with increased levels of anti-cancer agents such as isothiocyanates.

Funny Fact: During World War I, due to concerns the American public would reject a product with a German name, American sauerkraut makers relabeled their product as "Liberty cabbage" for the duration of the war. "Freedom Fries" come to mind :]

Fractals In Nature

Today in Lab we watched a film about fractals. I was really amazed, and wanted to see more. I found a gallery with some pictures of nature's fractals, and here are some of my favorite:

Peacock, so beautifull.

Seashell

Tree

Lightning

Queen Anne's Lace

Snowflake (not sure if this is real).

Aloe Vera

Pictures (exept snowflake) from: CoolPictureGallery

Berry Confusing: Bananas and Strawberries

Think of a berry, quick!!








Did this pop into your head?


Wrong! Strawberries are actually not berries. By technical definition, a berry is a fleshy fruit produced from a single seed. The strawberry, however has its dry, yellow "seeds" on the outside (each of which is actually considered a separate fruit). True berries, such as blueberries and cranberries have seeds inside.

Now, here's a picture of a true berry:What?... A banana? Yes! The banana fruit is a berry for the same reason strawberries are not.

The Botany of Desire

Today during Lab we finished wacthing the film "The Botany of Desire", which is based on the book by Michael Pollan. I really liked it and though it was extremely interesting. It focused on four points:

Apples
-99% of apples were turned into cider
-People preferred cider than water because it was safer to drink.
-There is a "museum" of apples, were many apple trees are kept and are examined by scientists.
-"Cloning" the commerical apples has made them more subseptible to pests that have been evolving.
-Scientist are tryng to transfer the genes of pest resistant apples ro commercial apples.

Flowers
Tulips were a big comodity in Turky.
-People would pay insane amoutns of money for a tulip bulb of the "broken " type.
-The broken tulip was white with blue and people loved it. But then it was known that the interesting coloring was caused by a virus.
-This left people who had invested a lot of money in their tulip, in ruins.

Cannabis
-It was used to treat conditions such as asthma and cancer, and pain.
-The name "marijuana" came from Mexico in the 20th century.
-Loui Armstrong used it, as he fet it helped him with improvisation.
-It contins THC, which combines to receptors in the brain. Which was an important discovery because it proved that there are recepors in the brain.
-Appetite, pain, and memory are affected by cannabis.

Potatoes
-Originated in the Antics.
-Europeans took them to Ireland, where the Irish started cultivating them. They solved a lot of hunger problems.
-They only grew one kind, so when a fungus arrived on a ship, it ruined all the potatoes
-This killed one million people of hunger, 1 out of 8.

Color in Food, Part I: "Purple Ketchup?!"

Is the color of food relevant?

Many years ago, while I still lived in a small town in Mexico called Parral, Chihuahua (the "Capital of the World" as locals call it, when it's really in the middle of nothing), I came over to visit my aunt here in El Paso. We were having breakfast one morning when my aunt placed a purple bottle on the table. I asked my cousin what that was, feeling silly of my ignorance of "American food", and he said: "It's ketchup, we have green too!", while he poured some of it on his food.

Maybe it was because I came from somewhere where things like that didn't exist, but I just felt squeamish of eating purple ketchup and decided to pass and eat the regular kind.

Now I come to the conclusion that the color of a food has a great impact on whether we choose to eat it or not. I feel like our brain relates the color of the with the food taste of it. We've come to judge whether a food tastes good or bad according to the color it has. We also have an expectation of the color a food should be, and even if it's a couple of shades lighter or darker, we question whether it's good or not.

It's not casual that nowadays our foods are filled with artificial colorings. Color appeals to the appetite. For example: Maraschino cherries are dyed an obviously artificial looking red. But look just how cute it looks on our sundae. I bet if it wasn't a bright red, we would probably push it aside because we would assume that, since it has a dull color, the flavor will be dull as well.


---
As I was researching for this post, I found that Heinz's weird ketchup didn't have much demand, and was discontinued after a few years. Indeed, ketchup should look red.

Vestigial Traits: Appendix

Some species display traits that have seemingly lost all or most of their original function in a species through evolution. A great example is the appendix in humans.

The vermiform appendage—in which some recent medical writers have vainly endeavoured to find a utility—is the shrunken remainder of a large and normal intestine of a remote ancestor. This interpretation would stand even if it were found to have a certain use in the human body. Vestigial organs are sometimes pressed into a secondary use when their original function has been lost.

One potential ancestral purpose put forth by Charles Darwin was that the appendix was used for digesting leaves as primates. It may be a vestigial organ of ancient humans that has degraded down to nearly nothing over the course of evolution. Evidence can be seen in herbivorous animals such as the koala.
The cecum of the koala is very long, enabling it to host bacteria specific for cellulose breakdown. Human ancestors may have also relied upon this system and lived on a diet rich in foliage. As people began to eat more easily digested foods, they became less reliant on cellulose-rich plants for energy. The cecum became less necessary for digestion and mutations that previously had been deleterious were no longer selected against. These alleles became more frequent and the cecum continued to shrink. After thousands of years, the once-necessary cecum has degraded to what we see today, with the appendix. On the other hand, evolutionary theorists have suggested that natural selection selects for larger appendices because smaller and thinner appendices would be more susceptible to inflammation and disease.

Evolution: Divergence, Parallelism, and Convergence

We are covering evolution, so I decided to dig out my Antrhopology notes from last semester and create some diagrams to portray the differences between divergence, parallelism, and convergence. Click on the pictures for full size!

Divergence
Related species that evolve differently as they adapt to different environments.

Parallelism
Relates species that evolve similarly as they adapt to similar environments.

Convergence
Unrelated species that evolve similarly as they adapt to similar environments.

New Species of Cockroach

Two students from Trinity High School in New York City, Brenda Tan and Matt Cost, made an interesting discovery.

"Ew I'm so gross, but everyone loves me... ♥"

These student were working on a project focused on testing the DNA of over 200 things. They found interesting things: mislabeled dairy and caviar, duster feather from an ostrich, surprisingly pure-beef hot dogs, etc. But they also discovered a new species of cockroach.

What looked like a regular cockroach didn't get a DNA match from the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank. Professor Mark Stoeckle agreed. "Closely-related species don't differ by more than one percent," he said, "while this cockroach is four-percent different. This suggests it is a new species of cockroach."

---
Why do I keep writing about cockroaches?...

Max and China: A Punnett Square

Meet Max.
We got him when he was just a couple of weeks old, almost 10 years ago.

Meet China.
She belongs to the neighbors and has been Max's girlfriend for the past 6 years. We do not let Max out without a chain (because he runs away for fun), but the neighbors do let China out. They see each other usually on the afternoon when we chain Max in the front yard so he has a change of view (how spoiled!).

A a couple of years ago, China managed to sneak into our backyard and ended up carrying Max's offspring. Four puppies were born, and they looked something like this:

Yay for Photoshop cloned puppies!

Let's assume that the dominant allele for black coat is "B", and the recessive allele for the light beige coat is "b". Looking at Max's phenotype, we can deduce that his genotype is homozygous recessive, bb. But in China's case, her phenotype doesn't make her genotype as obvious.
China can be either homozygous dominant, BB, or heterozygous, Bb. Let's find out which is the correct genotype:
If China's genotype was homozygous dominant, BB, there is no way a puppy with light beige coat could be born. All the puppies would be heterozygous: black, carrying the recessive allele for beige coat.
Now we can see that the only way a puppy would have beige coat would be if China was heterozygous.

Conjoined Twins: What went wrong?

My cousins are identical twins. I actually wasn't able to tell them apart until they were 17.

Identical twins share more than their matchy-matchy outfits. Identical twins, or monozigotic twins, start as one fertilized egg, which later splits into two. This causes their DNA to be the same. Two exact copies.

So where does it go wrong for conjoined twins?

In the case of conjoined twins, a woman only produces a single egg, which does not fully separate after fertilization. The developing embryo starts to split into identical twins during the first few weeks after conception, but stops before the process is complete. The partially separated egg develops into a conjoined fetus.

Abigail and Brittany Hensel, born March 7, 1990 in Carver County, Minnesota, United States of America, dicephalic conjoined twins, two heads, two arms, two legs, cannot be separated.

About 40 to 60 percent of conjoined twins are still born, they die during birth. And, for some reason, female siblings seem to have a better shot at survival than their male counterparts. Although more male twins conjoin in the womb than female twins, females are three times as likely as males to be born alive. Approximately 70 percent of all conjoined twins are girls.

Surgical separation is tough one. Doctors need to see which organs the conjoined twins share. Also, the difficulty level rises depending on where the twin is joined. For example, twins joined at the sacrum at the base of the spine have a 68 percent chance of successful separation, whereas, in cases of twins with conjoined hearts at the ventricular (pumping chamber) level, there are no known survivors.

Although success rates have improved over the years, surgical separation is still rare. Since 1950, at least one twin has survived separation about 75 percent of the time.

Even after survival of surgical separation, twins will have to undergo intensive rehabilitation because of the malformation and position of their spines. The muscles in their backs are constantly being flexed and they often have a difficult time bending their backs forward and backwards and sitting up straight.


Source: http://www.umm.edu/conjoined_twins/facts.htm

Omnipresent Corn

I've loved corn since I was a kid. In Mexico, when you bought corn, it most of the time came with a green corn worm. My brother and I loved the worms, it was a cute pest! We probably enjoyed playing with the worm as much as eating the corn.

Corn is a staple in many families' dinners all over the world, and corn is good. It has vitamin C and A, iron, and fiber. But what about when it stops being a whole food? Oh no... we get corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.

Credit: Natalie Dee

Corn syrup is everywhere. Why? Because it's a cheap and serves multiple purposes: thickener, sweetener, and humectant (an ingredient that retains moisture and thus maintains a food's freshness). In the United States, cane sugar quotas raise the price of sugar; hence, domestically produced corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are less expensive alternatives that are often used in American-made processed and mass-produced foods, candies, soft drinks and fruit drinks to help control cost. In a nutshell, using corn syrup instead of sugar lower expenses, therefore raising company's profits. Companies main purpose is t make money, but it's sad when it takes a toll on people's health.

Corn is also fed to cows and other livestock, because (as I learned in Food, Inc.) it's cheap, fattens the animals quickly. and allows for year round beef production in colder climates. The fatter corn fed cows have a more marbled meat than grass fed cows and this is what the consumer in today’s beef market has come to know as the standard.

Though “corn finishing” produces bigger, fatter cows in less time, corn is not a natural diet for a cow. Because of this unnatural corn rich diet, some unhealthy side effects take place. Most notably, a higher incidence of E. coli O157:H7 occurs in corn fed beef than in grass fed beef. In 1998, a Cornell University study revealed that cows fed on a natural grass diet had at least 80% less E. coli O157:H7 than grain fed cows.

http://www.nbafoodadvocate.com/corn-fed-cattle-bigger-cows-bigger-e-coli-threat-more-foodborne-illness-1177

Food, Inc.

Old MacDonald had a farm,
Ee i ee i oh!
And on that farm he had some genetically modified chickens,
Ee i ee i oh!

Today during Lab we watched the movie Food, Inc. I really liked it, it made me feel glad that I'm a vegetarian, but it still left me a bit very freaked out. It portrayed companies as evil corporations who only care about profit and not about the health of it's consumers.

One of the many things that made me feel a bit sick were the chicken scenes. I felt disgusted when they showed the difference between a genetically modified chicken and a normal chicken. The birds were given antibiotics and couldn't even move and sat in their own feces for their entire 45-day-life. How about some KFC for lunch?! :]

It also showed how the food industry affected low income families. They work a lot and it's easier and cheaper to eat fast food than go to the supermarket, buy whole foods, go home and cook them. This same issue also leads to obesity and diabetes. Why would a family buy vegetables and cook a nice meal, when they can get a burger for a $1? Instant gratification.

Commodity crops: corn, wheat, and corn, where also mentioned in this film. They are in almost everything.

I enjoyed this eye-opening film, and I wish everyone could have chance to watch it. Maybe it wont make people become vegan or vegetarian or organic eaters, but it will definately make them aware and they'll see the story behind their dinner.


http://www.foodincmovie.com/img/downloads/Press_Materials.pdf

Cancer Immunity

Naked mole rats are special. They have an "immunity" to cancer. Or at least a high resistance to it as scientists haven't found evidence of it. These hair-less rodents live up to 28 years, which is the longest for any rodent.

Biologists at the Unversity of Rochester believe they have found the reason. The findings show that the mole rat’s cells express a gene called p16 that makes the cells “claustrophobic,” stopping the cells’ proliferation when too many of them crowd together, cutting off runaway growth before it can start. The effect of p16 is so pronounced that when researchers mutated the cells to induce a tumor, the cells’ growth barely changed, whereas regular mouse cells became fully cancerous.
The reason, the researchers discovered, is that naked mole rat cells rely on two proteins--named p27 and p16--to stop cell growth when they touch, whereas human and mouse cells rely mainly on p27. "They use an additional checkpoint," says Gorbunova, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The additional level of protection may explain how the rodents remain cancer-free for their entire lives.


Sources:
http://www.neatorama.com/2009/10/27/naked-mole-rats-immune-to-cancer/
http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56123/
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2009/10/26-02.html

Wrinkly fingers and toes.

Everyone's experienced this: After taking a bath or a long shower, our fingers and toes get wrinkled.

What causes this? One word: osmosis. Osmosis is the movement of water across a membrane from high concentration to low concentration. In this case there is a higher concentration of water in the bathtub than in your skin.

So then why is it that only our fingers and toes get wrinkly, but not our arms or legs? This is because our skin has a layer of waterproof keratin on the surface, preventing both water loss and uptake. On the hands and feet, especially the toes and fingers, this layer of keratin is continually worn away by friction. Water can then penetrate these cells by osmosis and cause them to become wrinkled.

Low Iron in Vegetarians: Lentils

Two years ago, when I decided I wanted to become a vegetarian, my mother's main concern was how I would make up for the nutrients I would miss out from animals. I'm not a picky eater, so maintaining a well balanced diet is not hard for me at all: I love all kinds of vegetables, fruits, and legumes.
One of my favorite legumes are lentils. These legumes are insanely high in proteins, including the essential amino acids isoleucine and lysine. Lentils are deficient in two essential amino acids, methionine and cystine, however, sprouted lentils contain sufficient levels of all essential amino acids, including methionine and cystine.
Lentils are actually one of the best vegetable sources of iron. This makes them an important part of a vegetarian diet, and useful for preventing iron deficiency.

And yet another great thing about this legume is that it's cheap, so it is a relatively good substitute for those who can't afford meat.

Cockroaches and Junk Food

Cockroaches are known to live anywhere, and surviving eating anything.But just like people, roaches on a junk food diet don’t fare well. According to one study, even cockroaches get fat and unwell when their diet is less than healthy.

Researchers at the University of Exeter, in England, fed one group of young roaches a well‑balanced diet of high‑protein fish food and oatmeal. A second group dined only on fish food–which in the roach world is the equivalent to a diet consisting mainly of burgers and fries.

Overall, the roaches raised on a poorly balanced diet were fatter and took longer to mature than the insects that enjoyed a more healthful diet. Even when some junk food‑eating roaches were switched to the more healthy diet midway through the experiment, they still weren’t as healthy as roaches that ate healthful meals from the beginning.

Similarly, another similar British study found that baby crows that scavenge junk food from city garbage cans are less healthy than crows in rural areas eating more natural, healthier stuff.

So why should we care about the diets of cockroaches and crows?

We already know that too much junk food is bad for our health. But learning that it’s unhealthy even for animals supposedly able to thrive on just about anything, well that drives the point home just a little bit more. If roaches and crows suffer from a poor diet, we’re all the more vulnerable.

http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/07/07/small-comfort-cockroaches-too-get-fat-on-an-unbalanced-diet/
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/08-0140.1

The Truth About Hand Sanitizer

I know I'm not the only person who carries around a bottle of hand sanitizer. And since the H1N1 scare, there are hand sanitizers dispensers all over the school. But does it really make a difference?

Hand Sanitizer vs. Soap and Water
We are sold this product (hand sanitizer) with the claim that it can replace hand washing. But what we ignore is that this should only be so in situations when there is no water and soap available. The Food and Drug Administration, in regards to regulations concerning proper procedures for food services, recommends that hand sanitizers not be used in place of soap and water but only as an adjunct.

This basically says that even though it may somehow help (and it is better than not washign hands at all), hand sanitizer is not fully effective when it is used on it own.

Kills 99.9% of Bacteria
This statement is mostly untrue. Manufacturers of these products can continue to claim that the sanitizers are up to 99.9 percent effective in killing germs because they were tested on inanimate surfaces rather than human hands.

Manufacturers perform the germ killing test on a inanimate objects, such as tables, and chairs. The human hand though is complex, a warm, living surface that is much more vulnerable to germ growth and attack. These manufacturers also perform these experiments in controlled situations with constant variables. Daily life is not controlled, and so is susceptibility to germs. If these tests were to have been conducted using live humans, the %99.9 claim would have to be removed.

"The physiological complexity of human skin makes
it very difficult to use for testing of this nature,"
Almanza (Barbara Almanza, associate professor of
restaurant, hotel, institutional and tourism manage-
ment) says. "The most clear and consistent results
were going tocome from using surfacesfor which the
variables can be controlled, and that's just not real life.
Real life is not neat and tidy."

Is it really necessary to strip bacteria from skin?
Actually, you can't fully kill all bacteria from the skin. Researchers have discovered that there are at least 250 kinds of bacteria that live on our skin. Some of the kinds they found were completely unknown.

Bacteria are natural, even necessary in human bodies. There are more bacterial cells in the human body than human cells. Not all bacteria are bad for you. The bacteria in our bodies are there for a reason. For example, bacteria in our intestines are important for digestion. It’s likely that the bacteria on our skin play important roles in keeping skin soft and enabling it to do what skin is supposed to do.

Conclusion
So why is hand sanitizer popular? Maybe because we’re obsessed with cleanliness, though it’s impossible to completely rid the skin of bacteria, and in any case it wouldn’t be a good idea to try.

There’s evidence that the bacteria that live in, and on us. They help protect us from microbes that do cause infections. Getting rid of our natural bacteria could pave the way for harmful bacteria to move in.


http://biology.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=biology&cdn=education&tm=46&f=10&su=p897.8.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=0&bts=1&zu=http%3A//news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/000211.Almanza.sanitizers.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/Hand-Sanitizers-The-Real-Truth

Pequin Peppers

Today during Lab we "dissected" peppers and we got to see what makes them spicy: capsaicin. We also learned that the smaller the pepper, the higher concentration of capsaicin it will have.

Which brings me to pequin peppers. My grandma brings us pequin peppers from the Sierra of Chihuahua, and they're really spicy. They are tiny , but just one will make you food spicy enough (sometimes more than enough). They have a rating of 30,000-60,000 units in the Scoville scale, which is a scale that measures the spicy heat of a chili pepper according to its capsaicin content.

Homeostasis and Fever

My youngest cousin, Mia, is 4 years old. She gets sick quite a lot during this time of the year; and gets fevers regularly.
I always though of fever as a disease, something harmful to your body. And yes, it can be harmful if the fever gets too high for too long, but it is actually something your body does to protect itself.
Homeostasis is the body's ability to adjust it's internal environment to maintain a stable equilibrium (a constant temperature).
But when the virus or bacteria enters, our body's immune system reacts by raising the temperature in order to kill off or make an unsuitable environment for the bacteria/virus.
That is why when a kid (or anyone) gets a fever, it is a sign that something is wrong and the immune system is trying to correct the problem.

Floating Paper Clip: Cohesion & Surface Tension

How can a paper clip float in water? Well, technically, it is not floating. It is just sitting on the surface of the water as it would sit on top of a desk.
One of the properties of water is cohesion: water molecules stick to each other. Water has a high surface tension at room temperature, caused by the strong cohesion between water molecules, which can hold the weight of a paper clip laying on its side. This high surface tension is also what allows some insects to "walk on water".