Cellular Respiration Song

 


 For our project, Austin and I composed a mashup of three songs with cellular respiration lyrics in place of the regular lyrics. Songs featured include, "Hoedown Throwdown" by Miley Cyrus, "That's How I Beat Shaq" by Aaron Carter, and "Baby" by Justin Bieber. We also made a video completed unrelated to cellular respiration that consists mainly of Austin falling off of a chair, kicking a tetherball, and making half of a snow angel in a basketball pinny and basketball shoes. This project really helped me expand my knowledge of cellular respiration and is a great way for me to remember cellular respiration. One new thing that I learned was the name of the 5-carbon compound in the Krebs Cycle, Ketoglutarate. Overall, the whole process was a really fun experience and expanded my knowledge of cellular respiration.

Glycolysis and the Kreb's Cycle

Learn how to draw cartoons, comics, and anime at Sketchfu!






Learn how to draw cartoons, comics, and anime at Sketchfu!

Gout of Town

Recent findings have just proven that the increased consumption of fructose in post-menopausal women heightens the chances of gout. Now what is gout, you ask? According to its Mayo Clinic page, "Gout is a complex form of arthritis characterized by sudden, severe attacks of pain, redness and tenderness in joints, often the joint at the base of the big toe." Gout occurs when uric acid, a waste product, crystallizes in the joints instead of passing through the kidney and exiting via urine. This is similar to how kidney stones occur, which is when uric acid crystallizes in the kidneys. An early indicator of gout is high levels or uric acid in the blood, known as hyperuricemia. Hyon Choi of Boston University School of Medicine and his research team, having researched and made findings of gout for the past decade, set about looking to see if fructose levels heighten the risk of gout in women. A previous study done by Choi and his team proved that fructose does indeed increase the risk of gout in men, so now they ran trials to see if that transferred over to women. The correlation between gout risk increasing factors in women and men may seem like pointless work, but gout itself is much more prevalent in men, and women are already at much less of a risk. 

The study was based on data taken from 79,000 pot menopausal women. Women who are not post menopausal are at an extremely low risk of contracting gout because they still produce a hormone that regulates uric acid levels. The study found, out of these 79,000 women, that consuming one sugar sweetened soft drink a day as opposed to one a month drastically increases one's chances of getting gout, a disease which is extremely painful.There are some pretty nasty looking pictures of gout, so considered yourself warned and think twice before watching my Animoto video below.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

In addition to proving that fructose consumption affects the possibility of getting gout, the article discusses the soft drink industry and the corn syrup industry. High fructose corn syrup is the chief sweetener in almost all non-diet soft drinks. Every time one woman drinks a Coke, she is increasing her chances of getting gout.  For a long time, health advocates have been protesting the use of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener. Unlike table sugar, which has the same amount of glucose as fructose, high fructose corn syrup usually contains about 58% fructose. In addition to raising the possibility of gout, fructose, which is broken down in the liver, can cause extra fat synthesis to occur.  Consumption of soft drinks has also been linked to an increased chance of pancreatic cancer.

Overall, even though non-diet soft drinks (especially Mtn Dew) are extremely tasty, they stealthily carry many health risks.

Even though I now know that these health risks are valid, I will just forget that I ever wrote this article and continue consuming Mtn Dew in excess. 



Sources:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003476.htm 

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/gout/DS00090 

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65355/title/Fructose_poses_gout_risks_even_in_women 

Sally: Grandma's Hairless Cat

You may or may not have a cat as a pet, but you have most likely seen one. While you were at your grandma's house observing her hairless cat, did you take the time to look at the magic of how he or she drinks? A recent paper has gone into detail of the wonderful complexity of just exactly how cats go about drinking. After reading those first sentences, you may be wondering what I could possibly be talking about. In your mind, you've most likely thought that cats drink in a simple manner. They form a ladle with their tongue and scoop the liquid into their mouth. Wrong. The method I just described is used by dogs, but cats employ a completely different method. Cats, being the intelligent creatures they are, take advantage of the liquid's inertia. Inertia is the laziness of an object, in simple terms. Inertia is the unwillingness of an object to change unless it is manipulated by another force. In this case, we will make the liquid milk and the manipulator gravity. As your grandma's hairless cat stealthily approaches the milk filled bowl (while wearing kitten mittens), he prepares to take full advantage of the inertia of the milk. Your grandma's cat, henceforth known as Sally, dips her tongue, which is the same color as her fur (or lack thereof), into the milk. Almost as quickly as the tongue enters the milk, she pulls it, yanking the milk up into the air. For a split second, the inertia of the milk suspends it in the air, and in this moment, Sally surrounds the milk with her mouth and swallows it. After that split second of suspension, gravity, the manipulator, kicks in, snapping the milk back down into the bowl. Still thirsty, Sally repeats the complex and intricate process again until her thirst is quenched.

The intricacy of this seemingly simple process was discovered by a team of scientists led by Pedro Reis. The team went about observing this by using high speed cameras, as cats dip their tongues down into the liquid an astounding three and a half times per second. Even more astoundingly, when the tongue shoots back into the mouth, it moves at a speed of seventy-eight centimeters per second. When Reis first began the experiment, he and his team figured that the roughness of the cat's tongue would play a role; a prediction that was drastically wrong. In actuality, the tip of the tongue that penetrates the surface of the liquid is smooth, and the smoothness is actually very good for lapping up the milk or water. Throughout the research, Reis and his team found that the viscosity of the liquid, and least between the bounds of what a cat would logically drink, did not affect the process. Rather, the determining factors were the inertia and gravitational pull. One may think that this is an odd thing to research or that somebody must have done it before, but as Rebecca Z. German of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says, "What we know about mammalian feeding is woefully incomplete."

Here are some videos, one of a cat lapping up milk in slo-mo, and the other of a simulator demonstrating the inertia of water.


FAST LAPS from Science News on Vimeo.


TONGUE SUBSTITUTE from Science News on Vimeo.


So now you know, and next time you see your grandma's hairless feline lapping up some milk, you can explain to all your friends what Sally is really doing.

Source:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65379/title/Cats_drink_using_lap-and-gulp_trick
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-481062/Puss-Hood-Hairless-Sphynx-cat-keeps-warm.html

Osmoregulation in Bull Sharks

All sharks that live in marine environments have adapted their osmoregulatory systems in order to survive. If they didn't, then they would die. Most sharks survive in saltwater due to a high concentration of urea and TMAO in the bloodstream as well as urine that contains excess salt. In marine environments, the external environment has a very high concentration of salt. In order to stay in balance with this outside environment, normal organisms would let water out to try and balance the concentrations. However, if a shark did this then it would soon have too high of a concentration of salt inside its body. To deal with this, sharks bodies contain urea and TMAO. Urea and TMAO make the inside environment saltier, and then balance out the concentrations that way. Water is constantly passively entering the shark through the gills and once inside the body, passes along to the kidneys for desalinization. In sharks, the kidneys make do a very efficient job, and send a very high concentration of salt out via urine and retain a lot of freshwater, preventing the inside of the shark from having a concentration of salt that is too high. Bull sharks are unique because they can survive in marine environments as well as freshwater environments. This is possible because Bull Sharks adapt their osmoregulation systems depending on what environment they are in. When they are in marine environments, they osmoregulate like other sharks, using urea, TMAO, and efficient kidneys to keep an isotonic relationship with the external environment. When Bull Sharks are in freshwater, they basically tone down their kidneys and remove not as much salt but more urea and TMAO. It should be said that this process must be gradual and that a Bull Shark just dropped from saltwater into freshwater it will die. Since Bull Sharks have this unique ability to adapt their osmoregulation system from the normal process of getting rid of salt to the process of retaining salt, they are capable of living in freshwater.       

Sources:

http://www.sharksavers.org/en/education/shark-biology-behavior/385-how-bull-sharks-can-live-in-fresh-water-through-clever-osmoregulation.html

http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/white_shark/tmao.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark#Osmoregulation

http://animals.howstuffworks.com/fish/bull-shark.htm

http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~etaylor/426www/lectures/sharks3.html

Cell Community of the TuneSquad

See here  for better viewing.

Cholera

Cholera, or Vibrio Cholerae, is a rod shaped bacteria that is transmitted through water and food. V. Cholerae produces cholera toxin, which causes the severe diarrhea that is a symptom of Cholera. If Cholera is not treated promptly, than death by dehydration can quickly occur.

 Characteristics of Bacteria:
Vibrio Cholerae  is a rod shaped bacteria with flagella that, when it reaches the small intestine, causes severe disease. Most of the bacteria does not survive for long inside the human body, but the cells that do survive long enough to travel through the small intestine to the intestinal wall do so by shutting down protein production while they travel through the highly acidic stomach fluids. The bacteria create flagella to help them swim through the thick mucus of the small intestine. Once the bacteria reaches the intestinal wall, it begins to produce the the toxic proteins that make up the cholera toxin.

Cholera:

When the bacteria reaches the intestinal wall, it begins to create cholera toxin, which leads to the main symptom of extreme diarrhea. This happens because the cholera toxin activates a certain enzyme in the intestinal cells, and changes there function so that they extract water as well as electrolytes from the tissues and the blood and force it in to the open space inside the small intestine. All of this fluid proceeds to come out of the body as diarrhea. Paired with this extreme loss of fluids is dehydration, urine failure (anuria), an increased acidity in the blood (acidosis), and circulatory shock, which occurs when blood is not able to provide nutrients to tissues quickly enough. Circulatory shock can lead to cardiac arrest or hypoxemia. Teh diarrhea also carries many ions, and the loss of ions, particularly potassium ions, can lead to heart failure as well as circulatory failure. Due to all of these critical symptoms, untreated Cholera has a 50-60% mortality rate.

Treatment:
If Cholera is diagnosed quickly, it can easily be cured by quickly administering fluid either intravenously, or orally if glucose is added. Due to Cholera's simple treatment, the mortality rate stays fairly low for such a quick killing disease. Cholera is really dangerous in less developed countries where sewage is not adequately treated and Cholera can travel extremely quickly. Many of these countries also lack the resources to perform the simple treatment.

Sources:
Image 1: http://www.topnews.in/health/general/health-news?page=10
Image 2: http://www.dr-evans.com/advancedbiology/cholera.html
http://www.textbookofbacteriology.net/cholera.html
http://www.cdc.gov/nczved/divisions/dfbmd/diseases/cholera/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera

Macromolecule Lab: Lemons

This past Tuesday, I worked without a lab partner to determine the presence of different macromolecules inside lemons. We as a class used four different indicator tests to see if glucose, proteins, starch, or lipids were present in each designated food. The first test performed was for protein, and was performed by adding en drops of Biuret's solution to five mL of the food. If the result was a brown color, then the food had protein; however, my lemon juice did not change color and it was clear that no protein was present. The second test, which was for glucose, required three mL of Benedict's solution to be added to five mL of the food, and then that mixture had to be heated for five minutes. If, when the mixture ws heated, a very obvious color change to a bright orange occurred, then glucose was present. When I added the Benedict's solution to the lemon juice, it instantly started bubbling upwards, almost to the top of the test tube. This reaction was due to the acidity of lemon, which caused the solution to react. However, when I heated the mixture after the bubble had settled, no color change occurred whatsoever. With this in mind, glucose is probably present in lemon. The acidity of the lemon most likely caused inaccurate results. According to this website, the presence of glucose in lemon is not listed, but in one cup of raw lemon juice, 5.9 grams of sugars are present. Odds are that glucose makes up part of those 5.9 g. The next test performed was for starch, and called for 5 drops of Lugol's solution to be added to 5 mL of the food and if the result was a dark black color, then starch was present. I decided that my color was a dark brown, but not the dark black that starch indicates. According to the same website, starch data is also unavailable, and this may also be due to the acidity, or it could be due to a misreading on my part. I could have decided that a positive test was negative, not believing the brown to be dark enough to be a positive indicator. The final test was for lipids, and required the food to be rubbed on a brown piece of paper towel and hung up to dry. When dry, a positive read would have a shiny or glossy look. My lemon test was not shiny at all, and this makes sense, as the website I mentioned before states that no fat is present in raw lemon juice. While my results may have been tainted and not 100% reliable, I believe that glucose and starch are present in lemon, and that protein and lipids are not.

Nucleic Acids

For my Jing project, I decided to cover nucleic acids. Below is the presentation that I came up with. (Sorry about the varied volumes as well as the background noises)

Properties of Water

Properties of Water:

• Universal Solvent
• Adhesion and Cohesion
• Polarity
• Density/Lattice Formation of Ice
• Capillary Action
• Surface Tension
• Specific Heat
• Amphoterism/Neutrality

 Listed above are what I believe to be the eight main properties of water. While researching the properties of water, I found some sources that said water had around ten properties, while others suggested it was only four or five. The eight properties that I believe water has are listed above, and in the body of this post I will explain this properties and why I discounted other candidates.

Water is commonly referred to around the world as the universal solvent because so many substances dissolve in it. Since it is very common to find things that dissolve in water, it was given this moniker. Water also is adhesive and cohesive. The adhesive nature of water refers to water's ability to stick to other substances, while the cohesion refers to water's trait of sticking with other water. As a result of cohesion, you obtain surface tension, which refers to the surface of water where the hydrogen bonds need to be severed in order for something to pass through them. This was evident during the paperclip experiment (see picture above) as well as when a person does a belly flop in to a pool. As a result of adhesion, you arrive at capillary action, which refers to when water climbs up the sides of objects such as straws, creating a meniscus. Water is polar, which means that one side of the molecule has a slightly positive charge while the other has a charge that is slightly negative. When multiple water molecules are introduced to each other, the positive side is attracted to the negative side, resulting in a hydrogen bond, which is fairly weak when singular, but strong when in the masses. Water is well known to have a density of 1g/mL as a liquid. Most substances are denser as solids and less dense as liquids, but water breaks this rule. Ice is less dense than water because of the way the hydrogen bonds act when they freeze. While most solids pack more molecules in a smaller space, the water molecules spread out more when frozen, and subsequently lead to a smaller density. (Video is simulation of freezing water) This spread out molecular format is known as a lattice formation. If water did not behave like this, then ice would sink, there would be no more icebergs, and ponds would begin to freeze from the bottom and work its way up. Another property of water is its specific heat. This refers to the amount of energy that is needed to raise one gram of a substance (in this case water) by one degree Celsius. Water has a very high specific heat, which explains why on a hot summers day the water in the ocean stays cool. This is important in nature because it helps prevent the body temperatures of mammals from increasing greatly due to the weather. The final property that I believe water has is amphoterism, or the fact that pure water is a neutral seven on the pH scale, but that it can easily be manipulated to become more acidic or basic depending on what it needs to be used for. It should be noted that the pH scale is a logrithmic scale, which means that for every increase in one on the 0-14 scale, the liquid is becoming more basic by ten times the previous number.  

These are what I believe to be the properties of water that make it such a unique compound.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphoteric
http://www.uni.edu/~iowawet/H2OProperties.html
http://prezi.com/uod1timpjiwk/8-properties-of-water/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmjLXrMaFTg
BSCS Biology a Molecular Approach: Ninth Edition

Prologue and Course Description Response

After reading the prologue of our textbook and the course expectations sheet, I have drawn several conclusions of what I wish to achieve this year. The prologue gave brief descriptions of what would be covered in the textbook, and included topics such as evolution, bioethics, and many others. I hope that the textbook will inform and educate me about how the body works, how cells work, how animals bodies developed over time through natural selection, and how medicine can be abused. The prologue also explained hypotheses and predictions, as well as pseudoscience. I look forward to achieving a much greater understanding of all these topics. Through the course expectations sheet, I hope that this year I learn to become a more independent learner by formulating my own hypothesis and coming to my own conclusions while improving my clarity in labs and projects. Overall, I think this year has a lot to offer academically.