Drafts

When light enters the human eye it is refracted by the cornea, lens and both the aqueous and vitrious humor and is focused onto the eye's retina. This refraction is not entirely perfect however, and so the eye can use cillary muscles to contract the lense for further adjustments. When the image from reflected light is not focused properly, this can lead to either hyperopic or myopic conditions. These are what is more commonly known as far sightedness and near sightedness respecively. When an indavidual is far sighted the image is focused behind the eye. When they are near sighted the image is focused in front of the eye.

The retina of the eye is covered in photoreceptors. These come in two forms, rods and cones. Rods are very plentiful, outnumbering cones nearly 20:1. These are used mainly during situations of dim light. Cones will however detect color and are used in bright light. When light enters the photoreceptor cells a protein called rhodopsin is bleached, causing a conformational change. Rhodopsin will then activate a G-Protein called tansducin, and the signal continues to propogate until sodium channels in the photoreceptors are closed, which in turn halts the release of glutamate. Post synaptic biopolar cells will respond to this lack of glutamate by either turning on or off, depending on the type. These bipolar cells then signal (or don't) ganglion cells, which continues to propogate th single to the brain where it is processed.

I found my spider web in the fork of a tree right outside of the mahar lecture hall.  I saw a few and chose the best one for the photo and that was easy to reference for size.  The green grass was too light of a background for the camera to pick up the web so I had a friend hold up a dark purple folder directly behind the web.  I then used a measuring tape for reference and held the tape below the web extended about 10 inches and parallel with the angle of the camera. I took a few pictures with flash and a few without just to capture everything.  I then backed up onto the concrete by mahar and took another picture of the tree where the spider web was

Finding a spider web on the UMass Amherst campus proved to be harder than anticipated. While walking around campus, I made sure to keep an eye out for any crevices or untouched places where a spider web may reside. At 12:00 PM on Thursday, a spider web was located near the Lewis Residential Hall main entrance on Thatcher Road. The stairs to the main entrance had black, barred side rails on either side. While standing on the first step, facing the Lewis House main entrance, a spiderweb was found on the stair railing to my right. This part of the railing was at the bottom of the stairs, where the end of the railing is tucked around itself. This part of the railing made an oval-shaped hole where a person would typically grasp the railing as they first start walking up the stairs. The spider web was tucked underneath the bent part of the railing, in between the oval-shaped hole; the spider web was enclosed on all sides by the railing.

On page 28 there are two sets of three pictures displaying different parts of a tree. Assuming that the top row of pictures was taken independently, and that the bottom row of pictures tried to replicate the original set, we can infer different facts. The first inference is that the person who took the original set of pictures wrote as well a description of how they were obtained, and the second person followed this set of instructions to produce his photographs. We can infer this because both sets of pictures look very similar, and if someone had the task to photograph a tree they could have gone to any tree, but in this case all the pictures show the same tree and the same areas of it. We can infer as well that the two sets of pictures were taken with different cameras or filters, since the bottom row has different lightning than the top row, which could be due to a failure to explicitly explain to use the normal set up of the camera or a specific model of photographic device. Finally, we can infer that the sets of pictures were probably taken at different times of the day, although with no major differences in timing, because the position of the light falling over the sap in the middle picture changes slighlty between rows.

Sexual selection is an evolutionary mechanism that pits the males and females of a species against each other. Females are often described as cryptic in their display patterns because it is not necessary to be flashy. Females are given the proverbial “choice” of mate and are therefore choosy in the males. Males compete to be flamboyant and display qualities that the female uses to appraise the fitness of the suitor and decide if this will raise the fitness of her offspring. The “sexy son” hypothesis and “good genes” hypothesis respectively say that a female will choose a respective mate because it of their appeal because their children will then have that same appeal for the next generation and that a female chooses a mate based on their genes because it will result in the offspring having better genes. This makes males compete for the female and the female choice decides what is deemed appropriate. Some scientists suggest that the qualifier is not anything of apparent value, just what has evolved as the required quality. This changes with the generations of females over evolutionary time and as a result, male characteristics change as well.

Sexual selection also gives way to what is known as an evolutionary arms race. This is where the male and female are both evolving to counteract an adaptation that the other sex has that prohibits one sides reproductive fitness. Such examples are the development mechanical reproductive traits that prohibit the males from forcefully mating with a nonconsenting female, evidenced by the development of duck penises and vaginas, or the evolution of infanticide as a technique to enhance fitness. Infanticide involves a sexually mature adult, usually male, killing the offspring of another mature adult of the same species. This is done by the killer to become the new sexual partner of the deceased’s parent which would otherwise have been unavailable. This act raises the fitness of the killer and reduces the fitness of the victim’s parent.

For the Spider web methods project I went to the ISB building, the side that faces the Life sciences building. I went to the back of the building where the doors are located near to the no smoking sign. I took the picture with my cell phone camera before my class started around 3:15 pm. At first it was kind of difficult to find the spiderweb because I didn’t know where to find one except for the place I had lived before on campus last year. When I saw the spiderweb I didn’t hesitate to take the picture. Additional pictures were taken in order to capture the best angle of the spiderweb because it was near the door and the window. There was a lot of people coming and going through the doors, so that was some kind of an impediment at first. For the map I opened the Umass Amherst Campus App on my phone that thankfully showed me the ISB location that I will screenshot later and save it on my phone. In class I installed Inkscape on my MacBook but at first it didn’t want to open and thankfully the professor helped me out and I was able to open the program and copy and paste the pictures I took on September 17, 2018.  I labeled the figures A)was for the spider web B)was for the environment and C)for the map. 

When I was in high school, I got my first car. It was a 2003 Ford Explorer that my father passed down to me when I got my drivers license. It was not in the best shape, but it got me from where was to where I needed to go so I did not complain much. One day while I was sitting in the parking lot of a local pizza shop, smoke started billowing from under the hood of my car and a potent chemical smell filled the cabin. A light started flashing on the dashboard indicating that my engine needed to be checked. The temperature gauge on the dashboard went into the red zone, indicating that the engine temperature was getting too high. I turned off my engine and exited the drivers seat, only to find green liquid pouring out of my car onto the pavement. My inference was that a tube of some kind had broken off of where it was supposed to be attached. The car had a fair amount of rust on it, so I thought that the metal screws holding the tube in place could have rusted away over time and reached their breaking point. Sure enough, when I opened the hood of the car, there was the anti-freeze tube swinging freely and still pouring anti-freeze fluid out of the car. It was through the observations I made and then conveying them to my mechanic that he was able to fix my car so I could drive it again. I used my basic knowledge of a car engine to make inferences on what the problem could possibly be, and then used my observations to narrow down the possibilities. To fix the car, my mechanic relied on my initial observations of the problem, his secondary observations once the car was in his shop, and then his inferences to determine what steps he would take to fix the problem.

Just recently I learned about cancers ability to evolve and adapt to its environment. It does this by having multiple branches of highly unique sections of the tumor. Like a tree, there is a central “trunk” of cancer cells from which highly evolved cancer cells can stem from. If you were to cut a whole tumor in half, you would be able to see the distinct sections; some off colored, some highly vascularized, and others larger or smaller than the rest. These variable sections of tumors are sometimes only a few centimeters apart or on opposite sides of the tumor. This variability is why cancer is so hard to treat. A biopsy only removes a specific part of the tumor, but as we now know, there are multiple parts and different constructs of the same cancer elsewhere in the tumor. The biopsy will allude how to treat that one specific section even though a different section will not be affected by the treatment at all. Cancer is a fickle beast and one that still leaves many wondering how we are ever supposed to cure it when it appears the more we fight cancer, the more it fights back. Hopefully one day we will figure it out and hopefully its someday soon.

In the computer lab, both pictures were exported to Microsoft Word (version 15.26). Both pictures were placed side by side; the one on the left was the picture of the Lewis Hall main entrance and the picture of the right was the picture of the zoomed-in spider web. Following the placement of these picture, a screenshot of the ‘OpenMaps’ aerial view map of UMass Campus was taken; this screenshot was zoomed in so that North Pleasant Street, Thatcher Road, and all of the residential halls in between these two streets were present in the screenshot. Lewis Hall was present in the right, upper corner of the screenshot. This picture was placed above the two pictures of the spider web. Three letters were then placed on each picture: ‘A’ on the map picture, ‘B’ on the picture of the Lewis Hall entrance, and ‘C’ on the spider web picture. These letters were placed as text boxes, in font size 24 with black coloring. 

There are currently four FDA approved treatments for glioblastoma multiforme. They are all drugs that cover a pretty broad aspect of cancer mechanisms: Temozolomide is one of them and it is an alkylating agent, meaning it attaches an alkyl group to the guanine of DNA and effectively disrupts its ability to copy itself. The problem with this approach is that it will affect more than just cancer cells and this lack of specificity makes it detrimental to the rest of the body as well.  Bevacizumab is another FDA approved treatment for GBM. It inhibits angiogenesis, which means that it is good for stopping the metastasis of cancer. It is actually considered a relatively safe drug in general, but there are definitely still side effects including blood-clotting, allergic reactions, retinal detachment, etc. It slows tumor growth in GBM patients, but it doesn’t increase the survival rate. Lomustine and Carmustine are the other two FDA approved GBM treatments and they are both alkylating agents as well. With all of these treatments in mind, brute-force approaches seem to be the only thing they will approve, and specificity is not really brought into the picture. Without that I believe that these treatments will only briefly prolong the inevitable.