Mr. Dillon’s SciTech World

This week, our unit on the digestive system ends with some questions from the book (inside the class room) on pages 576 through 587.  Prior in the week, we covered the mechanical and chemical digestion process that turns large food particles into small molecules which can be absorbed across a cell membrane and carried by the circulatory system.  Lastly, we covered the absorption of the digested materials by the small and large intestines.

Assignments 27, 28, 29, and 30.  Mechanical digestion, Chemical Digestion, Absorption, and the Book questions respectively. 

So you have this assignment and you need to do a poster about lungs.  OK, first thing to do is pick a theme and then you need to find information and pictures to help you. Themes can range from Healthy lungs, Smoking and Lungs, Effects of Air Polution on Lungs, Lung diseases, Lung Cancer, Emphysema, etc…. Next thing, your poster must have a diagram labeled with 5 features or facts about your theme. Some resources you might want to visit include:  http://www.quitsmokingsupport.com/lungphotos.htm http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/lungs-article.html?source=G4103&kwid=ContentNetwork|929422825  You can find more and I will add more as I find them. http://www.cancer.gov/ http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/resp.html   http://www.netterimages.com/image/lung-neoplasms.htm

 http://whyquit.com/joel/Joel_02_17_smoke_in_lung.html

 good Luck and don’t forget to color your diagram.  Want to try this using technology?  Use Microsoft PowerPoint and paste pictures onto a slide.  Insert text boxes to type in words to describe the pictures and also use the draw toolbar to help create little pointers and “balloons” to locate your text into.  Very important:  when you use someone else’s pictures (copy them off the Internet) give the website or photographer credit!

My heart has beat over 200,000,000 times already and has never taken a day off… well, it has never rested an hour, or even a minute, in fact I don’t think it has ever skipped a beat!  Pretty amazing stuff, yet many people die when their heart suddenly stops working.  Most of the time there are warning signs that people overlook or deny they exist, they think they will never have a heart attack!

Risk Factors:

Did you know that males are more likely to have heart attacks than women, and some races and ethnicities have higher risk of suffering heart attacks than others.  Since you are who you are and you can not change who you are related to, you are stuck with those risk factors. 

But, there are some risk factors that you can control.  Most of these factors include what you put into your body and what you d with your body.  Things like smoking can greatly increase your risk of heart attack!  Well I did not say “Don’t Smoke”, even though I’m a teacher and I am supposed to tell you, nope, I’m just going to tell you that it makes your heart work harder and increases your chance of a heart attack.  Really, that probably wont be a concern until you are about 45 or so, but who knows, you might already be dead from cancer or something like that!  OK, I am trying to get you to come to the conclusion that smoking isn’t such a good idea.

Speaking of what you can do to help reduce your risk of a heart attack is to get plenty of exercise and to watch what you eat.  Although those fries are tasty, the amount of salt and fat makes your heart and many other organs work harder to process them.  So when you head out to PE and your coach wants you to run the mile, run it!  30 minutes daily of aerobic exercise at or near your target heart rate  is essential to a healthy heart.

There are numerous websites about caring for your heart, but I have included only one organization.  Why?  Its time for me to go to bed now!

 http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4726

http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4736

Last night and today were probably the most incredible days in a long time.  The Governor of Arkansas, Mike Beebe gave the keynote address at last night’s EAST Partnership Banquet.  Incredible for a person of such high office to take notice of what kids with computers can do.  It seems that Governor Beebe has been noticing what kids with computers can do for quite a while.  Students with projects dealing with methamphetamine abuse received his interest while he was attorney general and prompted the state legislature to enact legislation dealing with meth.    EAST students do have a chance to change the world  and today they did when over 300 cell phones were turned in and turned into calling cards for soldiers.  there are many other examples, but I can only type so much.  171 schools  with Environmental and Spatial Technologies classrooms gathered to show what they do with the technology in their classrooms.  Kids from some of the most severe poverty schools and kids from well to do schools gathered on a level playing field to show what they can do with their greatest asset, their minds!  If you give a student a tool, they will use it!  Some build fences around students and restrict the sites they can go to and make sure they do not abuse their computer time and then you have EAST, give them great computers with industry standard software and let them go, see the great things that they can do. 

This week at the Hot Springs convention center, the makers of those hardware and software programs came to see what these young minds could do with their tools.  They also came to give lessons and introduce new features to their products.  Whoa!  they were out with the kids and not with the lucrative corporate accounts?  Students had full access with the makers of software and hardware, the actual people that invented and/or developed software like SketchUp and Virtual Reality. 

The Governor, the developers, inventors and sponsors,  what else could a conference need or want?  Oh yeah, I forgot, there were colleges that came out to recruit students to their campuses and even to establish scholarships to recruit the  best of the most talented students in the room!  Awesome!

Sacramento, Phoenix, Little Rock and here we are now in Hot Springs!  Writing from the 11th floor of the Austin and looking North at Hot Springs National Park.  Sounds like nothing but fun, but it was work, work, work.  Our booth is set up on the floor of the Hot Springs Convention Center and Morgan represented California to introduce awards at today’s opening plenary.   The students are working at tomorrow’s booth judging competition to represent Maywood Middle School.  I’m the only one that has been through this before in my party, and I’m trying to impart wisdom as daylight has faded and it is getting late locally.  The difference in time zones has made it easy to stay up late here in HS, but it is killer in the morning.  Tomorrow the kids will get a chance to taste grits for the first time. 

I must not be a very good web searcher!  I have been trying to verify my statistics claimed today that similar DNA patterns exist in  and are shared amongst many species.  There were many articles, but finding ones that I could understand was difficult.   Some of the latest research I can find shows that the similarity between humans and chimps may be lower than the 98.5% I claimed in class today.  National Geographic has an article that suggests only 96% but that is still huge!

National Geographic Article

There was a great deal of information about structural Homologies to be found and the site below in fact the site covers the difference between analogies and homologies very well.  This is a student friendly site with some great diagrams and illustrations.

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/side_0_0/homology_04

I thought I may have found exactly what I wanted to show you when I ventured onto this page of the same website as above.  The Pax-6 gene is the gene in humans that controls the formation of the eye.  Amazingly, this gene can be substituted into a fly and the fly can grow eyes!  The amazing thing about it is that flies have compound eyes, and humans don’t.  But the Human Pax-6 gene can cause a compound eye to form in a fly.  This means that even though the eyes appear different, they come from the same set of instructions!

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/similarity_hs_02

My last link below has a chart that if you read it across, tells you how much of an organism’s genes mach up with a list of other genes.  The top row shows that there is a high correlation between Chimps and humans, but at the far right, it shows that we still maintain a relationship with plants, fungi (yeast), and bacteria E. (coli)

http://eugenes.org/all/hgsummary.html

I hope you use the links and find them informative and entertaining!

The Periodic Table of Elements is neatly designed to contain coded information so that it is easy to find and shows patterns and relationships.  The top 3 rows or “periods”  are perhaps the easiest because the atoms are relatively small, contain mostly familiar elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Neon and Aluminum, and there are few exceptions to rules that can be made about atoms.  Really there are no exceptions, but some parts require advanced and complicated explanations.

The first rule for electrons is that they like to occupy the lowest energy level possible. (Think of yourself sleeping in on Saturday until noon) 

The second rule is that there is only so much room on the lower or inner energy levels.  The number of electrons on any of the first three energy levels equals the number of elements on that level.  There are 2 elements on the first period so there i only room for 2 electrons on the inner most  level.  There are eight elements on the 2nd and third levels, so there is only room for 8 electrons on the second energy level and 8 electrons on the third energy level.

once we begin filling the electrons, we can begin to see patterns like all of the elements in the first column have 1 outer electron and in the second column, they all have 2 outer electrons.  This is all part of the coded information in the periodic table.  Can you make predictions about the other rows?  What is the significance of the number of outer energy level electrons?

Genetics, Natural Selection and The Environment over billions of years (Geologic Time) have brought us to where we are now in our evolution. 

Sexual Reproduction brings about variations within a species with every new offspring.  Wouldn’t it be a dull place if everyone looked alike?  We get variations from our parents and we are born with them.  Some variations may give us an advantage to survive (pass our genes to the next generation), and some variations may make it more difficult to survive.

When we consider that every individual has variations, the natural selection part comes about from a number of factors, but they all have to do with the environment an organism lives in. 

• Obviously, we must consider climatic conditions such as drought, extreme heat, extreme cold, torrential rain and so forth.  The polar bear has adaptations to help it survive in the harshest polar environments, but it is poorly adapted to survive in the Sahara Dessert. 
• We must also consider ecologic conditions:  how much food is there?  How many organisms rely and compete for the same resources. (supply and demand) There are other social aspects such as behavior and appearance also.  When we put humans in this same situation as “wild organisms”, it quickly becomes apparent that what a person acts like and behaves like make them more or less attractive!

These environmental conditions determine whether a variation is favorable or unfavorable for [SURVIVAL]!

The Geologic record gives us evidence that the earth is older than it is easy to understand.  We measure in years, while geologists measure in millions of years!  Do variations bring about change in what  a species looks like and acts like?  Are groups of organisms separated from each other by means of plate tectonic activity?  Does Plate Tectonic activity alter the environment?  When we look at the Mesozoic era, we find that there once was a single continent named Pangaea, and over the course of about 150 million years it separated to become the 7 continents we now know.  Conditions did not stay the same during the mesozoic.  Dinosaurs were the predominant life form of the Mesozoic, but there is a real difference between the dinosaur species present during the Triassic versus those present at the end of the Cretaceous.  

Evolution has taken place and discarded over 99% of the species that have ever lived on thsi planet.  But, there is something that all organisms share and are linked together with those forms of life that preceded us:  DNA! 

Special Thanks to Michelle Wiggley for presenting to my science classes and telling us about the selective breeding process as it applies to Beef.  Many students left the class hungry for a nice juicy steak and wondering which breed of steer would provide their next one.  Special terms that were used in the presentation included crossbreeding, hybrid vigor, inbreeding, out breeding and “nicking”.  I do not believe that any of my students will ever go by a herd of cattle without trying to identify their breed.  Brahmas were the crowd favorite in addition to the Chianina which weighed in at 4000 lbs and stood six feet tall at the shoulder.

Michelle is a Junior at CSU, Chico majoring in Agriculture and Graphic Design.  She has been active in 4H all her life.

In order to fully understand the break up of Pangaea, we really must figure out that the Atlantic Ocean is getting wider and the Pacific Ocean is getting smaller.  Its not something that someone without some really sophisticated equipment could measure, but over a couple of hundred million years, the amount of movement can really add up!  The best example of plates being moved away from each other occurs at the Mid Atlantic Ridge (MAR)(the longest continuous mountain chain on Earth).  Iceland is right smack dab in the middle of the MAR and is constantly having volcanic eruptions.  The island is getting bigger al the time as the MAR expands and send more lava to the surface all the time.  Its even happening under the ocean, and some of the world’s strangest life forms live in this dark, cold ocean bottom where water can bubble out of the earth at over 300 degrees F.  Information on the mid Atlantic Ridge and a good explanation of all types of plate boundaries is available at:  http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/understanding.html#anchor5567033  For some great videos of the life forms that inhabit deep thermal vents, check out this site:  (you will probably need and be prompted to update your quicktime (safe) and they will offer to sell you these clips…view, do not buy unless you feel really rich!)  http://www.oceanfootage.com/stockfootage/Thermal_Vent/owner%3Dalgiddings

On the west coast of North and South America, there is a different plate interaction.  This one is called a subduction zone.  Subduction zones occur when an oceanic plate is forced under a continental plate.  oceanic plates are heavier than continental plates in part due to the fact that the sediments and rocks of the seabed are wet.  This also explains what happens as the wet sediments are forced under the continental plates.  The water they contain gets heated up and placed under tremendous pressure.  This makes the magma contain lots of explosive steam.  Some of the most violent volcanic eruptions ever recorded have taken place near subduction zones.  In 1980, Mt St. Helens in southern Washington state.  The force of this volcano sent a hot wind of toxic gas down the mountain and produced a plume of volcanic dust that went high into the atmosphere!  When the dust cleared, over 1000 feet of the mountain top was gone!  To see a complete set of eruption photos and diagrams, click here: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/SlideSet/ljt_slideset.html  A visual on a subduction zone is located at :  http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learning/glossary.php?term=subduction%20zone

  The last Plate boundary is when two continental plates contact each other in a collision.  The tallest mountain range in the world (and one of the newest), the Himalayas is the result of the Indian plate colliding with the Eurasian Plate.  Great forces cause the rock layers to warp and bend and to shoot upward when continental plates collide!   National Geographic has a lot of Mt Everest info and pictures at:  http://www.nationalgeographic.com/everest/