Glog happy :) PKU

Part 2! This is another Glog on PKU. I really enjoyed making this one. And I promise that I will soon find another way to share my knowledge besides Glogs in a creative way, they are just so much fun. haha
Here you go! :)
Link:
http://sierra3.edu.glogster.com/phenylketonuria/

Glog happy :) Enzyme Lab

So if you have been looking at this blog lately, you will notice my crazy new addiction to Glogs...well guess what! Merry Christmas! I got two brand spanking new Glogs about PKU and our Enzyme Lab that we did about three weeks ago. Oh yeah! Get excited :)
Let's start with the Enzyme lab. So we started out with a solution of 3 ml of H20 and 3 ml of H202 (Hydrogen Peroxide). We then added an enzyme, which in this case was yeast. This starts a chemical reaction that produces O2. Now how does that magical process happen? I wondered that too. And I found out! The way it works is the enzyme(yeast) breaks the oxygen molecules of the H20 and H202 and then they are released. Using the mac and a cool little gadget we used to measure the pressure we found our results. Looking at the Glog which includes some very nice graphs (Thank you much Kiel and Michael) and information on those graphs you will find our results :)

Link:
http://sierra3.edu.glogster.com/enzyme-lab/

Photosynthesis, Cellular Respiration, and information :)

Alrighty, this is the Glog that Sidney, Chapin, and myself worked on to talk about some of the stuff we were learning about photosynthesis. And we also got a taste of cellular respiration as well. We decided that instead of doing the "Green Human Project" we would take a different approach and just make a Glog about what we learned. So here you go!!
Link to the Glog-

 http://sierra3.edu.glogster.com/photosynthesis-cellular-respiration-and-energy/

Cell Structure!

Well it took much longer than I expected. But I finally have my cell structure post put together. I made a Glog to talk about what I have learned about the parts of a cell and what they do. I really enjoyed making the Glog but I actually did learn a lot from different sources on what things make up a cell and what they look like and how they work. So here you go! Cell Structure Glog right below :)
Here is the link as well if its easier-
http://sierra3.edu.glogster.com/cell-structure/

Photosynthesis Lab

Alright, here is my Glog for the Photosynthesis "Dry Lab". I believe if you can't see it well enough you can click on full view when you put your mouse over the pink Glogster thing to get a better view :) Or head to this link-

http://sierra3.edu.glogster.com/photosynthesis-lab/

POISON?!?!

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/51597/a_list_of_deadly_poisons.html?cat=5

So I know I haven't been on in a while...bad. Haha. But I am going to try and change that. And just post some things about different biology topics that we are working on. Poison is a recent thing we talked about in class. And I found an interesting article on some of the most deadly poisons. And one of them on this list (which you can see for yourself by clicking on the link above) really caught my eye. So im going to spend some time talking about this poison. Botulinum was the very first poison on this list. And I really took an interest. From this little bit of information on the poison I learned that when you contract this poison the nervous system completely shuts down and you die in excruciating pain. Sounds delightful huh? I decided to look up some more information on Botulinum and compiled a list of the things that interested my about this particular poison.
Here it is!
1. Botulinum Toxin is extremely lethal to humans.
2. Botulinum Toxin is produced by the bacteria Clostridium Botulinum.
3. One microgram of Botulinum can kill. It causes paralysis in the musculoskeletal and respiratory systems.
4. Clostridium Botulinum is the cause of the disease Botulism.
5. There are three kinds of Botulism.
6. Intestinal Botulism is caused by the ingestion of Clostridium Botulinum spores. Babies under a year old are more susceptible to this type of Botulism because their digestive juices are not as acidic as older people, and therefore cannot defend against the spores.
7. Wound Botulism is caused by wounds infected by Clostridium Botulinum.
8. Eating food that contains Botulinum Toxin can cause Food-borne Botulism. The administration of antitoxin and artificial respiration is effective if treatment happens in time.
            Alright, that is some of the stuff I learned about Botulinum. Check out the link to read more about some other poisons. And I will hopefully be back on soon with a post about Cell Structure! :)

ITS A LAB! On Osmosis...The magical diffusion of water.

Work sheet to go along with our diffusion and osmosis lab

We recently did a lab to learn more about cell membranes.  It was a diffusion and osmosis lab. Diffusion and Osmosis are pretty important, because water and certain solutes get in and out of a cell through these processes. During diffusion and osmosis molecules move from regions of high concentration to regions of lower concentration. We observed this during our lab. We used dialysis tubing as our permeable membrane. We filled a cup with water and then added iodine, which I have now become familiar with from a recent lab on saccharides. We tied off one end of the tubing and filled the tubing with a solution that contained glucose and starch. We then tied off the other end of the bag and placed it in our cup of water and iodine. We left it to sit over night. And then lather, rinse, repeat.<Just Kidding ha ha. When we came back to our cup the next day we found something interesting. The high concentration of glucose passed through our permeable membrane AKA dialysis tubing, into the lower concentration outside of the tubing. We also found that the bag had expanded. This occurred because of osmosis. The water in the cup had diffused into the bag. Obviously, there was a lot going on and passing through and fro. The iodine also got in on the action, the solution in the bag drastically changed color from its nice translucent state to a midnight black. The iodine had diffused from the cup into the bag. Isn't osmosis and diffusion just magical? :)

Cell Membrane Poster! Yay!

Poster that is now hanging in the biology classroom. Woohoo!

In biology we made posters. But not just any posters! Posters of cell membranes! From making this poster and labeling all the different parts, I learned some new stuff about cell membranes. Cell membranes are very interesting and there is a lot of  "stuff" that is actually part of a cell membrane. Perhaps my favorite of all are the phospholipids which make up the phospholipid bilayer. They keep everything inside. They create a barrier between the "insides" of the cell, and the environment outside of the cell. There are two parts to a phospholipid. The head is hydrophilic and the tail is hydrophobic. Cholesterol is another component of the cell membrane. It resides inside of the phospholipid bilayer. Cholesterol helps cells to communicate with each other. Receptor and transport proteins are also something I learned about the cell membrane. Transport proteins transport different things throughout the cell. Those "things" are received at the you guessed it! The Receptor proteins! Glycoproteins were another part of all of this that really popped out to me. The glycoproteins play a role in cell to cell interactions. Glycoproteins are proteins that contain Oligosaccharide chains covalently attached to polypeptide sidechains. That concludes a little bit about my cell membrane poster. Hopefully this will be the first blog post of many on cell membranes.

Sorting through thoughts on Carbohydrates and Saccharides

It has become obvious to me that I need to take another try at understanding carbohydrates. A little while back we did a lab in biology. The purpose was to get a better handle on saccharides. I am still trying to get a better understanding. Carbohydrates are used as an energy source for living things. In a carbohydrate the hydrogen to oxygen ratio is 2:1. Monosaccharides are simple sugars. Mono meaning one means that a monosaccharide consists of only a single sugar molecule. Glucose is a monosaccharide. Glucose is very important, it is a simple sugar that is the major source of cellular fuel for all living things. During dehydration reaction, two monosaccharides join together to create a Disaccharide. For example, Sucrose (Table Sugar) comes about with the bonding of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule. Lactose is another disaccharide. Lactose is the monosaccharide molecules glucose and galactose bonded together. When someone is lactose intolerant, they can't break the disaccharide lactose down. Polysaccharides are polymers of monosaccharides. This means that a polysaccharide is constructed by linking together a large number of monosaccharides. Polysaccharides, I am still trying to fully understand. From what I have gathered, most polysaccharides are used as energy storage molecules. In a plant, the polysaccharide starch is a polymer of the monosaccharide glucose. Plant cells use starch for energy storage. Animal cells use the dissacharide glycogen for energy storage. Again glycogen is a polymer of glucose. I am going to be honest, when we were doing the lab, I was a little lost as to what it all meant. But now I have a better handle. We tested different foods to find what they contained, if it was mono, di, or polysaccharides. The different reactions we received from the combination of the food and the benedict or iodine solution, would help us to see what saccharides that food contained. As I am looking over the paper that contains the information we gathered during the lab, cereal for example contained some polysaccharides. I have actually learned a lot about saccharides. I just need to continue to stay focused, ask questions, and gather the information.

Adventures of Water Woman...better late than never.

Below is the animation I did on some of the properties of water.  I have been meaning to put this post up for a while, but like I said, better late than never.
 So here you go, THE ADVENTURES OF WATER WOMAN #1! Enjoy!

GoAnimate.com: Adventures of Water Woman #1 by MinnieMouse1

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

A little follow up...on pH levels

Yesterday, I posted the presentation that myself, Sidney Buhr, and Chapin Galena made on our acids in your stomach lab. From this I learned a little bit about bases and acids, and what make them bases and acids.
One of our best friends along this study on bases and acids was the pH scale. The pH scale measures how acidic or basic a substance is. The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14. If the pH level of a substance is less than 7 the substance is considered an acid. If the level is greater than 7 the substance is basic. And if the level is exactly 7, it is considered neutral. Now what decides the pH level of a substance? What makes it a 3 or an 8, etc, etc? It all has to do with the concentration of H+ ions and OH- ions in water. If the pH level is increasing, the H+ ions are decreasing and the OH- ions are increasing. Water has the same amount of H+ and OH- ions, so they cancel each other out. And there you go! Water is neutral.
This lab that we did, was to test which antacids would be the best at stomach relief. The best antacid would raise the pH level of the gastric acids in your stomach. It was much easier to understand what the whole "pH levels" were about, when I knew exactly what they were.

Is It Really Worth It: Lab Write-Up

A Little Bit About Water

As of late, water has been our focus in biology. I have enjoyed this because I love being in the water, I often wonder if in my past life I was a fish. So learning about all the little things that make water act the way it does has been a fun task. Today, I read an article about a new way to see the structure of the molecules of water. The article was describing the process in which researchers were getting to take a more developed look at the water molecules. It did honestly fascinate me, researchers found that since water molecules are everywhere, they happened to get trapped under a sheet of graphene on an atomically flat surface of Mica. The water would get trapped in between the sheet of graphene and the Mica, the graphene would than act kind of like shrink-wrap. It forms itself around the water molecules so tightly that it shows the atomic structure of the molecules. So in turn, making it easier for the researchers to see those molecules and study them. What they found was that the first layer of water on the mica was actually two water molecules thick, and that it has the structure of ice. In my opinion the finding of this new way to conduct molecule research is astounding. We are finding out more about our world, the big and the small parts, everyday!

Placebos, Double-blind, Clincal Trials- OH MY!

                 This past week in biology we studied something pretty interesting. CLINICAL TRIALS! I spent a fair amount of time on a website called clinicaltrials.gov, this little site provided an interesting glimpse of what clinical trials are and how they work. We spent time focused on clinical trials that are double-blind and include a placebo. I chose to take a look at a clinical trial focused on a drug to help with depression. Like I mentioned before, the study included a placebo. 

Placebo Receiver

Treatment Receiver

                      "What in the world are placebos?" Is what I bet you are asking yourself at the current moment. Well I'm gonna let you in on a little secret...they are NOTHING. Yeah, you heard me-nothing. In a clinical trial, once you go through the initial screening visit and are accepted into the clinical trial. You are randomly sorted, among the other participants in the trial to either receive the drug under study or a placebo. So lets say Mickey Mouse and Spongebob Squarepants are participants in a clinical trial. Mickey receives the real drug and Spongebob receives the placebo. Spongebob is taking what he thinks is the real drug. But is really the placebo, that does nothing and has no effect on him whatsoever.  
               This brings us to our other key word, double-blind. If a study is double-blind, neither the patient or the people administering the drug/treatment know which patients are receiving the drug/treatment or which patients are receiving the placebo. Clinical trials offer a lot. Clinical trials take a treatment or drug and put it through stages. Check it over and  make sure it is safe to put out there on the market. To participate in a clinical trial, you have to meet certain requirements for that trial. Age, sometimes gender, and health conditions are somethings among others that are taken into account when you are accepted into a clinical trial. Overall, clinical trials are pretty interesting...and every once and a while, a little helpful.
(Mickey Mouse Picture found on www.free-extras.com)
(Spongebob Squarepants Picture found on www.frederatorblogs.com)