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.