Cellular respiration review

Follow this link to watch my review of cellular respiration. It may take a while to load because it is fairly long, but give it some time.

Or, you can watch it right here.

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.

iPad assignment (UPDATE: 10.19 (UPDATE 2 10.20))

This is your first iPad assignment of the year!

First, download and read these two files for the lab on Thursday.
Lab 10A - Blood Pressure
Lab 10B - Heart Rate

Then, go to this website and request access to the site. This is the class Wiki, and will be the place to go for course materials to download.

UPDATE: Please also email me from your iPad at my school address with the subject line "AP Bio." There does not need to be anything in the body of the email, this is just so that I will have your school address in my contacts list.

UPDATE 2: Comment from Esther: I can't seem to send an email from my ipad for some reason. This is a known problem, and the tech department is working on. For now, the web server (link) is working, so you can send your email through that.

Chapter 36 Packet Answers

Here are the answers for the Chapter 36 review packet. Sorry if it is hard to read, I am trying out my iPad camera as a document scanner. Let me know in the comments if there are any answers you are unsure of.

Kidney animations

Ok, here is an attempt to get the kidney animations on here. Looks like the Flash player didn't embed correctly, at least on my MacBook. But you can still download the files and view them.

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.

October Schedule (UPDATE)

Follow this link to view the schedule for October.

Please note that the schedule at the link has had some minor changes to it. Please refer to the hard copy distributed in class.

Chapter 5 Review Packet Answers

Once again, any questions regarding the quiz on Monday, post them in the comments.


Interactive Questions


5.1  a. hydroxyl
b. carbonyl
c. aldose
d. ketose
e. ring


5.2

5.3 a. monosaccharide
b. CH2O
c. fuel
d. carbon source
e. glycosidic linkage
f. disaccharides
g. polysaccharides
h. glycogen
i. animals
j. starch
k. cellulose
l. chiton


5.4

Chapter 3 Review Answers

Here are the answers for the chapter 3 review packet that I promised. If you have questions, post them in the comments, and I will answer them as quickly as I can.

Interactive Questions

3.1

3.2

a. water molecules

b. absorbed

c. released

d. specific heat

e. heat of vaporization

f. evaporative cooling

g. heat

h. snow

i. ice

3.3

a. hydrophobic - nonpolar

b. hydrophilic - polar

c. hydrophilic - ionic

d. hydrophibic - nonpolar

3.4

a. 45 g

0.5 mol/1 L x 90 g/1 mol = 45 g/L

b. 228 g

2 mol/1 L x 57 g/1 mol x 2 L = 228 g

3.5

10e-3
              10e-6     8   basic
10e-7                   7   neutral
10e-1    10e-13         acidic


3.6
Donor - H2CO3
Acceptor - HCO3-


a. Left
b. right

Summer Assignment: 8.30

Final post for the summer assignment 2011! No articles to read this week, just some information I want to get from you. First, a couple of questions I would like you all to answer in the comments:

1. What was your favorite post/article from this summer?
2. What topics are you most looking forward to learning about in class this year?

Also, there are a few commenters for which I do not have full names matched up with their user names. If you are on the list below, please post a separate comment with your full name so that I can get your grades in the gradebook properly.

jon8than
ManasaD
Noel T
ThizzleBlog
trolby

Thank you very much for some great comments this summer, I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I have.

Enjoy your last week of summer, and I will see you when school starts.

Summer Assignment: 8.23

Fatal Attractions: Sex, Death, Parasites, and Cats

More mind-controlling parasites, this one in rats. Toxoplasma, a single-cell parasite, infects the brains of rats and changes their behavior. Rats are normally afraid of cats, and will avoid their urine. Infected rats, however, do not avoid cat urine sprayed areas, and may even be attracted to it.

You Can Be a Citizen Scientist

Great chance for people to become more involved in science, and help out researchers. The protein and RNA folding "games" look pretty interesting, I will probably check those out.

Summer Assignment: 8.16

A couple articles about interesting evolutionary adaptations in animals this week. The first one is about Müllerian mimicry in a butterfly species. This type of mimicry involves one species mimicking a bad-tasting species. This particular butterfly species can mimic a wide range of species, and the genes for these differences were all mapped to one chromosomal region, or "super gene."

The second article is about behavior in a spider species called whip spiders, or whip scorpions. If you don't like spiders, I suggest only looking at the first article. These spiders have evolved a vibration-based communication system which they use to peacefully resolve male-male conflicts. Researchers wonder if this system is used by other arthropods, since the detection hairs are conserved across the group.

Links:

These Butterflies are "The Transformers of the Insect World" — And the Answer to an Evolutionary Mystery

The Threatening Vibes of Whip Spiders

Summer Assignment: 8.9

Scientists Create Spermless Males to Fight the Spread of Malaria

Interesting new research in malaria prevention, which has shifted more towards mosquito control due to the emergence of resistant strains of the parasite. Scientists had thought for a while that controlling the reproduction of the mosquito would be an effective means of fighting the disease, but there was no good way to accomplish this. Producing viable, healthy, sterile males may be a feasbile means of mosquito control.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Do any of you have a problem with this? Is this playing "god" too much, messing with the reproduction of another species?


Females Can Control the Evolution of Male Handsomeness

Is there such a thing as too good looking for a guy? Does this work with humans? If a guy is too good looking, will he not attract as many women?

Summer Assignment: 8.2

Before we get to the articles this week, I thought that this was too funny not to share.
























Anyway, two related links this week about bird/dinosaur evolution.

Xiaotingia zhengi

Earliest Bird was Not a Bird? New Fossil Muddles the Archaeopteryx Story

A new discovery of a fossil which sits somewhere between feathered dinosaur/early bird has changed the position of Archaeopteryx from the earliest bird to more of a distant bird cousin, or maybe just a dinosaur with feathers that watched the birds evolve. Adding this new fossil to the evolutionary tree moves Archaeopteryx out of the bird lineage and into a group of dinosaurs along with the new discovery named Xiaotingia zhengi.



Most importantly, this new discovery illustrates an extremely basic and important aspect of science which is often lost in public education. Science is an ever-changing, fluid entity. Just because Archaeopteryx has been moved from the position of earliest bird, does not mean it is gone, or not an important fossil. And it certainly doesn't mean that evolution is wrong. Science is about putting forth hypotheses, and seeing if the data support them. If the data do not, they are discarded or revised. It is not correct to say that these hypotheses were "wrong." They simply reflected an earlier set of data. Science is full of examples of this.