Summer Assignment 7.28

• Newest viral discovery may be surprisingly common. So why did it take so long to find?
• Really big insect found in China.
• Do non-human animals create art?

Summer Assignment 7.22

Just one story this week; a longer piece on why we have blood types by one of my favorite science writers Carl Zimmer. You probably (hopefully) remember something about blood types from previous classes, and may even remember how to do the genetic crosses to figure them out. But have we ever thought about why we have different blood types? I know I never had until I read this article. Lots of interesting stuff in here, and overall it highlights a very important fact of evolution: If it exists, it most likely has an adaptive advantage.

Summer Assignment 8.27

UPDATE 8.28: The link for the class wiki has been changed to the current year. It went to last years site in the original post.

This will be the final week of the summer assignment this year. Great job with all the comments, I hope you found some of the articles I linked to interesting. There are a few things I have for you to do this week.

• To get credit for this week's entry, comment about what your favorite post was over the summer, and what you are most looking forward to learning more about this year.
• If you are registered for Dr. H's class (Block 1 or 2), please visit this website and request access. If you have used PB Works before, you can use your previous account information and will not have to confirm your email. If you are new to PB Works, you DO NOT need to use your school email account to request access. After I accept you, you will receive a confirmation email. 
• If you are registered for Miss Drust's class (Block 3), she will provide you with the course website.
• Once you have access to the wiki, feel free to have a look around. It is still a work in progress, so there is not too much there yet. There are some things on the front page for you to do.

I also wanted to share with you this comment left on the blog post from last week:

I am amazed by your thought provoking and well written commentary on these articles. I wrote the article about clownfish in Finding Nemo, and was glad to see that this was used in a biology class for a teaching experience. Keep up the great work and don't be afraid to ask questions. If someone doesn't know the answer to your question, then it must be a good question, and is worth exploring for the answer. If you ever have ideas, questions, or thoughts about fish, don't ever hesitate to write us at TheFisheriesBlog@gmail.com, and we will do our best to help you discover the answer!

Patrick Cooney
Fisheries Scientist 

So there you go, its not only me that says you are doing a great job with your comments and insights. Hope you have something fun planned for the last week of vacation. I am looking forward to seeing you all in two weeks.

Summer Assignment 8.20

• Ants may help predict the future of Facebook. I wouldn't hold my breath that Facebook will take the advice and get smaller in order to survive. I would say in 5 years it will be gone the way of Friendster and MySpace.
• Coffee and the brain. I disagree that there is such a thing as too much coffee. Maybe just not enough time to drink it all.
• The "scientifically accurate' version of Finding Nemo sounds so much better than the original.

Summer Assignment 8.13

• Pro: Generating your own food supply. Con: Wearing this thing on your face.
• Newly discovered protein may be key in memory formation. How much would you pay for a few shots right before AP week?
• So they lied to me about carrots helping with night vision. But they did it in order to win WWII, so I guess that is ok.

Summer Assignment 8.6

Really easy assignment this week. Of the below proposed scientific "breakthroughs", which one do you
      a) think is most likely to occur in your lifetime.
      b) most want to see occur in your lifetime.

Via Doghouse Diaries

Summer Assignment 7.30

• Brain control is here, and it sounds really cool and somewhat complicated.
• Spiders have personalities? 
• What is the evolutionary advantage of laughter?

Summer Assignment 7.23

Great comments on the first post last week. Remember that sometimes there may be a short period of time between when you post your comment and when it shows up on the blog. The only time you should worry about your comment getting lost is if posts show up that were not there when you submitted yours. Then, just re-post and it should be fine.

Links for the week:

• If you require iv morphine in order to move your hair, I would say yes, that is a Special Brand of Horror. 

• Turns out women knew how to cure Down's Syndrome all along.

• There is GMO wheat popping up in Oregon fields, and no one seems to know how it got there.

I will be out of town this weekend (Thurs - Tues) so comments will likely not be posted during that time frame. If your comment does not show up by Tuesday night/Wednesday morning then you should repost it.

Summer Assignment 7.16

Welcome to the first official post of the 2013 AP Biology Summer Blog. The rules are simple:

1. Check out the links I include in the post.
2. Make an intelligent comment on them.
3. Or respond in an intelligent way to someone else's comment.
4. Earn points!

Just a note, you don't need to read all of the links I post when there are multiple stories linked. You can always pick the ones that seem most interesting to you.

On to the links:

What You Thought About T. rex Was Wrong, But May Be Right Again

Most people probably envision Tyrannosaurus rex behaving something like this. Basically being a top predator and chasing down its prey. However, a few years ago some researchers postulated that T. rex may have acted more as a scavenger. This was based on the postulated population size of T. rex, and the fact that ecosystems cannot support large populations of top predators. Since behaviors don't fossilize, paleontologists have to look for other clues about how dinosaurs lived their lives. The article describes a T. rex tooth found embedded in a bone from another species. The bone shows signs of healing around the tooth, indicating that the dinosaur survived the T. rex bite. It seems to me to be a bit of a stretch to extrapolate an entire species behavior from one example. Imagine if some future or alien society got one piece of data from one current human, and decided "All humans did this." Scarey idea, depending on who the data came from.

Using Manure on Crops is a Really, Really Old Idea

Interesting point in there about how agriculture may have lead to social stratification and social classes. I always suspected that was all based on poop, now I guess there is evidence.

MIT Researchers Printing New Heart Muscle

If there was any doubt that we are officially in the future, this pretty much erases it.

Summer Assignment 8.17

• Using science to dispel an internet myth.Not that McDonald's burgers are any good, but they don't defy any laws of biology. What is the next internet/urban myth you would like to see overturned by science?
• A blogger posts her experiences before, during and immediately after open heart surgery. WARNING: if you don't want to see pictures of an actual human heart during surgery  DO NOT click the link.
• No more Olympics, so you get three science links this week. Will viruses some day power our cell phones (or other electronic devices)?

Summer Assignment 8.10

• Glow in the dark soldiers, circa Civil War era. Discovered by a high school student. I love this story. It really shows the importance of asking questions.
• So 3-D printers might be making houses soon. I can see this being very useful for martian or lunar colonies since it could potentially be automated.
• And of course, one more Olympics link.

Summer Assignment 8.3

• Continuing last weeks item about artificial life, scientists have created a synthetic jellyfish-like organism using rat cardiac cells. Video below.

• Even Usain Bolt wouldn't stand a chance if the Olympics weren't so species-centric.
• I am not really surprised that more effort and money is spent developing new weight-loss drugs rather than on efforts to simply get people to eat better and exercise more. Not sure I agree that a "junk-food tax" is the way to fix it, though if that is working in other countries, it may work here as well.
• So apparently this is real. Weird. Just remember, unexplained is not the same as inexplicable.

Summer Assignment 7.27

Early post this week. I am leaving tomorrow morning for a camping weekend, so I probably will not have internet access again until Monday. That means that comments may take a while to show up on the site. If you post a comment over the weekend and don't see it by Tuesday morning, shoot me an email, or just try reposting.

And now, the links:

• Parkour and orangutans. Not orangutans doing parkour, which would be awesome. If you are unfamiliar with parkour, you can watch the short video below.
  
  
  
Researchers were interested in finding out more about the energetics of orangutan movements in the jungle. The use of parkour athletes to simulate the movements allowed direct measurements of oxygen consumption, rather than using mathematical models. You can hear the guys from one of my favorite podcasts, Science...Sort Of, talk about this research at the 47 minute mark of their latest episode.
• When I was in grad school, a fellow student in my lab and I had a few discussions about whether we would ever be able to recreate a living cell via computer simulation. I was on the side of it being impossible, since there was no way to know how all of the proteins interact with each other. The other student felt that it was just a matter of time before computers became powerful enough to process all the data, and since there are a finite number of proteins in a cell, there must be a finite number of interactions. Looks like I was wrong. Though to be fair (to me), this is a very simple cell; one of the simplest known in fact, with only 525 genes (humans have around 30,000 protein-encoding genes).
• So this exists. Biology is weird. Not sometimes.  All. The. Times.

Summer Assignment 7.20

Thanks for all the great comments last week. Remember, if you are going on vacation and don't think you will be able to access the site to comment, please drop me an email with the dates.

• With the Olympics around the corner, this article looks at the bio-mechanics of sprinting, and if the 9-second mark will ever be broken in the 100 m sprint. Interesting that swing time (the time between steps) is equivalent for all runners at top speed. The men's 100m final is August 5th; the women's is the day before.

• What are the most important science questions the presidential should answer? Here is a list of 14 good ones. Four years ago, the McCain and Obama campaigns posted responses to science questions. I wouldn't hold my breath for a science-themed debate, but if you go here you can vote for your choice for moderator. This guy is winning, and would be awesome.

Summer Assignment 7.13

Welcome to the first official post of the 2012 AP Biology Summer Blog. The rules are simple:

1. Check out the links I include in the post.
2. Make an intelligent comment on them.
3. Or respond in an intelligent way to someone else's comment.
4. Earn points!

Just a note, you don't need to read all of the links I post when there are multiple stories linked. You can always pick the ones that seem most interesting to you.

On to the links:

• What do Mothers Against Drunk Driving, America's Most Wanted, and Batman have in common?  Post-traumatic growth of course.
• Newsweek says the web is "driving us mad." This guy (and most of the Twitterverse and Blogosphere) say Newsweek has no idea what science is.
• Someday I hope to make it up to Manhattan for "Manhattanhenge," if only because the odds of bumping into Neil deGrasse Tyson would be pretty good.

Cellular Respiration Overview

As I was looking over the work from today when I was out I saw this on the back sheet of one of the packets.

This outline is great, and would be a great thing for you all to know. I will elaborate on this a bit in class tomorrow, but this is a great basic overview.

Slime molds and evolution

Interesting story by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times about slime molds. They really are fascinating organisms, and can tell us a lot about evolution. And I love the practical uses people are finding for them, like designing highways, or planning how to reroute highways in case of a nuclear meltdown.

Summer Assignment: 7.26

Before the links, just a quick reminder about comments. I have been getting many emails wondering why comments are not showing up. Some of these have been actual issues, but most of them are just due to the moderation process. Before the comments show up on the post, I read them over and enter them into my gradebook. I try to do this twice a day (early morning and late night), but sometimes I am not able to get on right away. So if your comment does not show up right away, give it 24 hours before sending me an email. If i am going to be away for a few days, I will try let you guys know first. Thanks. Onto the posts:

Parasitic Wasp Employs Zombie Ladybug to Guard Cocoon

Parasites are so cool. Two weeks ago, there was a link to a story about how they are believed to be one of the driving forces behind the evolution of sexual reproduction. This week, zombies. Lots of good stuff mentioned in this post: evolution of bees, co-evolution, evolution of the stinger. I may try to mention parasites everyday this year in class.

How Advertising Manipulates Your Choices and Spending Habits (And What to do About it)

Not a biology-related post, but I still thought this was interesting, and also somewhat important. The author sort of lost me with the last two paragraphs, about how a world without ads would be the end of Western Civilization as We Know It. But i will say that I have gotten so used to Ad Block Plus on my browser, that when I am forced to use a computer without it, it is jarring to see all the ads. So if you don't have ABP installed, get it today (www.adblockplus.org).

Anyway, back to the post. Lots of great points here, and I love the "reference lifestyles" concept. And though I never watched Friends, I seem to recall they explained that huge apartment by saying it was rent-controlled from someone's grandmother or something. Any Friends fans out there back me up on this?

I feel that the most important message from this is to simply THINK. All. The. Time. Whether the purchase is a $35,000 car, or a $1.99 smartphone app (I hate Angry Birds for stealing my life), you should always ask yourself about why you are spending money on that particular item. As the author states in the post: intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation.

The ability to critically think and use your brain will be another running theme throughout class next year.

(Not the) Summer Assignment

This is not the first post for the summer assignment, so you will not have to comment on this. I just wanted to let you guys know that the first post should be up sometime late this week, maybe Thursday or Friday. After that, I hope to have them up on Tuesdays. Till then, here are some pics that will give you an idea of why this week will be late....

Course Evaluation Results

I thought this was kinda cool so I wanted to share it. This is a word cloud showing the most commonly appearing words in your responses to the course evaluation survey.

Question 1: Three words to describe Dr. Himmelheber as a teacher are:

approachable challenging clear determined done educated enjoyable entertaining fast-paced flexible fun funny general helpful informative insightful intelligent interesting keep knowledgeable laid-back mellow organized prepared sorry thats thorough tries understanding well-mannered words work

created at TagCrowd.com

Question 2: If I were to change one thing about the way Dr. H teaches it would be:

amount answers ap assignment assistance behind change chapter class continue correspond cover depth despite difficult dr easier engage exam excellent explanations fall feel give going guide home homework huge important interesting keep knowledge lectures lessons limit material memorizing mind notes nothing oral packets pictures planned points possible power powerpoints prepared print questions quiz rather read really review schedule school slides something sometimes study stuff talk taught teaching test that'd things times unavoidable understand versus written

created at TagCrowd.com

Looking at the results, obviously the PowerPoints and notes are an issue, along with the exam, but at least I am interesting. It is a little hard to tell since it is out of context, but I will attempt to address these issues.