Unit 10 Reflection

This unit was about the anatomy and physiology of the human body and how the different components work together to maintain homeostasis. Homeostasis is the process of maintaining the body's internal conditions and making sure everything is equal and stable within it. The systems of the body  are the circulatory, respiratory, nervous, endocrine, digestive, immune, and lymphatic. The circulatory and respiratory system work together to supply oxygen to the body through a system of arteries and veins which supply oxygen rich blood. Once the oxygen diffuses into the cells, oxygen is replenished through the lungs and supplied to the the body once again. The nervous system and endocrine system use electrical impulses and hormones respectively to communicate throughout the body. The nervous system is faster, while the endocrine system is longer but has a more lasting change. The immune and lymphatic system fight against pathogens and destroy waste within the body through the use of white blood cells and muscles. Some things I wanted to learn about more is the nervous system and how our brain works to help us do the things we do.I am really interested in psychology, and I am sure that the nervous system plays a big role in it.

The box heart diagram in one of Mr. Orre's vodcast, which helped me understand how the heart works. The second one is really interesting. It's how our heartbeat is made.

Favrite posts:

• Pig Dissection, because it was the most interesting lab I have ever done, and I will never forget how the different organs looked. I hope to do more disections in the future. 
• 20 Time Individual Reflection, because that was a project where I got to really express myself as a whole and got to do something I enjoyed. 

     Since the beginning of the year I have not only grown as a scientist, but also as a person. I have learned to cooperate with others through our many projects and tested my limits by accomplishing different tasks and gaining valuable experiences. I am proud of my blog and the work I have put into it. At the beginning of the year I was skeptical about the idea of blogging, but running this bio blog has not only made science more interactive, but also made it more interesting. 

20 Time Final Post

Here is the data we collected from our project which helped us reach our conclusion. The conclusion we reached is that impaired senses can in fact improve you memorization and concentration.

Our TED talk went as anticipated due to our preparation and hard work on this project. Our fluency and passion were well articulated due to our knowledge on the topic and both of our prior public speaking skills from speech and debate. If I was to do anything differently I would have brought a timer up there and I would have properly changed the slides to our content changes. The timing was important since we spoke faster due to our nerves and thus forget critical information and fell slightly under time. If we had timed ourselves it would have forced us to stretch our content and speak slower. I would keep our grade since it gave points in the areas which we deserved and took of points due to our incorrect picture citations. It was a really fun experience though it felt a little rushed due to the time constraints it really helped my presentation skills and public speaking. Below is our slideshow and out Ted Talk itself.

• http://bio20timenevinronit.blogspot.com/
• http://ronitsbioblog.blogspot.com/2016/05/20-time-individual-reflection.html

Pig Dissection

In this lab we dissected a pig, and found different parts of it. The purpose of this lab was to show what structures that we are learning about actually look like in the body. This dissection was really interesting, and valuable to me, because we could see the structures that we are learning about. For example we could actually see the heart, and where blood comes in, and where it goes out. We also saw the lung, intestines, liver, diaphragm, and many other important organs. What surprised me was how big the liver was compared ti every other organ. My favorite part was that we could see what different parts of the body actually look like.

 

20 Time Individual Reflection

For my 20 Time project, I asked the question, “Does impairing senses help memory retainment and memorization?” I wanted to do something that would help our students from our school as well as challenge me to go out of my comfort level. To challenge myself, I approached people I didn’t know very well and asked them to be a part of my experiment. I chose people from our class, other classes, and people not in Mr. Orre’s class at all. This challenged me because I am usually a very shy person around people I don’t know, but I tried to widen my horizons and guide them through my experiment.

To try to achieve my goal, I made 3 different experiments impairing different senses and with just my partner and I, and then retested those tests to check the reliability. I won’t go into too much detail about the experiments, but the three senses we impaired were sight, hearing, and smell. You can learn more about each experiment here. The thing I really liked about our project was not the actual experiment or results, but the process and learning on how to do these experiments. I got experiments with surveys and experiments, which I suspect would be priceless in the near future.

To say our project was a success is incorrect, but to say it was a failure is also incorrect. I would say that we are just getting started on the research for this, and I would love to work with this in the future. We did get some results to indicate us to the closer conclusion, but we did not take into account a lot of situational factors, like how the subject’s day was going or their intelligence. Maybe next time, I would be a little more organized with the experiment and maybe test with more than 2 subjects. A new challenge will not be only to find out if impairing senses help, but also why they help. I wonder what goes on in the brain during these processes. Again, I would love to continue with this experiment and maybe come up with a better justified conclusion.

Unit 9 Reflection

In Unit 9 , we learned about classification through an evolutionary perspective. Modern taxonomists classify organisms with a system of  "Domain -->Kingdom-->Phylum-->Class-->Order-->Family-->Genus-->Species". We also learned the three main domains; archaea, protista and eukarya. We belong to the domain of eukaryota. This effective system was first developed by Carl Linnaeus. Without this system, our understanding of organisms would be very unorganized. Of course, our tree of life is not completely filled up. I wonder if we will one day fill in the whole tree of life. Furthermore, I wish that we can somehow learn more about archaea, bacteria that live in extreme conditions. If we can somehow inherit these abilities, we could explore more areas of our world such as the deep sea or maybe other places in outer space.

 Link

Throughout this unit, we worked on a project called What On Earth Evolved. Each student got one species out of the top 100 that changed the world. I got the organism, Australopithecus. Even though I knew nothing about it before I started the project, I learned quickly and it turned out to be the best project I have doe all year in any class. I really got to learn about a new species, while also having fun. The California Academy of Sciences trip also helped me with the project as I got a deep explanation of Australopithecus from one of the guides. Apart from the information, I really got some experience with developing a slide show and speaking in public. My slideshow is attached down below. I spent almost three hours on this, and I think I really gave my best on this project. I then tried to memorize as much as I could for the presentation, and I was really surprised with my delivery. I thought I would get very nervous, but once I got going, I got going. I really enjoyed the project, and I am very excited for doing more projects like this.

One project I will get to do similar to that project is our 20 Time Project. Our project is on sensory impairment for better learning and memorization. However, I can use the skills I learned from the What On Earth Evolved project to help aid my 20 time project. I've learned that the less words on the slides, the better. For our 20 Time slideshow, we will try to put as little words as possible, if any. We will try to have a talk with our audience rather than just memorizing a speech. 
 Link

My Inner Fish

For the past week, we have been watching a video series named "My Inner Fish" based on a book with the same title by Neil Shubin. We first watched part 1, which talks about the transition from water to land. We learned about Tiktaalik, a transitional organism. It also showed how our hand evolved and its relation to structures in other tetrapods. This links back to what we learned about homologous structures because our palms & fingers are descended from Tiktaalik's flipper-hands.

The second video was called "Your Inner Reptile", which was about the transition from ancient reptiles to mammals. We learned about the ancestors of mammals and how their lifestyle involved living underground, hunting, hiding from dinosaurs, and using whiskers. It also explained the gene "EDA" which controls organs including hair, nails, and glands. This relates to Unit 5 because the gene EDA causes proteins to be produced and determines the location of growth for many organs.

7. What was the "needle in the haystack" that they were looking for in the Canadian fossils? Why was it important?

They were looking for a transitional tetrapod fossil. The organism would have to fill the gap between lobe-finned fish and the early amphibian. It should have an about equal amount of fish and tetrapod characteristics to be the "needle" they are looking for. The reason it is so hard to find is because the chance of an organism from almost 400 million years ago fossilizing is very low and it probably won't be well preserved. Another challenge was the weather down there.

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24. How and why did hair first evolve?

We think hair first evolved as a sensory organ in early mammals. They would have been similar to modern whiskers, except the rest of the body was just covered in bare skin or scales.However, on the other parts of their body, did they just have bare skin, or did they have just scales? I wonder if they had any of these, than how did the hair spread down to the rest of the body? I'm guessing EDA, but we may never know until farther is known about this topic.

Fire Corals

After looking at the different phylum from the Invertebrates Part 1 Vodcast, I was drawn to the phylum Cnidaria. One organism I found interesting was fire corals. Fire Corals are classified as Hydrozoa in the Cnidarian phylum. They use their long hairs that protrude from their skeleton to trap their prey and get their food from a symbiotic relationship with microscopic red algae called Zooxanthealle. Then they produce clusters of stinging cells that inflict the stings on human skin. I now know why when people go snorkeling and hit a coral reef, they get long lasting scars. Their polyps reproduce asexually, and are near microscopic size and mostly are embedded in the skeleton and are connected by minute canals.  These corals contain gastropores and dactylopores, that are visible on their smooth surface. Fire corals can reproduce asexually through fragmentation. However their brittle skins are easily to be broken during storms or by divers. This relates to learning about the phylum Cnidaria in the Invertebrates Vodcast, where we learned that Cnidria is classified by having specialized tissues. 

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