Perfect Paragraph

    Both films have similar opening birth-like scenes that indicate sexual themes will play a significant role in each film. Alien introduces the viewer to a dark and empty ship as it pans through the different rooms and corridors only to reach a state where there is a shift to a lit, white room. In this womb-like room, “men and women lay side by side, born in a micro-society that is ignorant to the inhibitions associated with sexual difference.” This is significant because it lays a foundation to take a stance on gender roles as the film begins with a sense of sexual equality. The members wake up from their hypersleep in the white, seemingly sterile environment with some brief disorientation and nearly naked. This is similar to what an infant would experience at birth in a hospital; a shift from darkness to light as they are being born, and in a daze, as they are crying and unaware of their overall situation. In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin makes use of the phrase “survival of the fittest”, where fitness is defined as reproductive ability/success. The desire and need to reproduce is a biological mechanism of living species, birth being the manifestation of sexual activity. Thus, this birth-like scene foreshadows the influence of sexually related themes throughout the rest of the movie.

Stereotypes can influence people's expectations and and keep people divided. Tayeb Salih attempts to show us that we are far more similar than different to any human, regardless of what part of the world we are from. Salih accomplishes this through the use of situational irony to demonstrate the similarities of traditions and social customs and also uses imagery to compare the real and genuine and ungenuine use of certain decorative items. Everywhere around the world there are always good people who care about their communities, and bad people who use communities for their own selfish benefit. The use of literary devices in this novel are to help demonstrate that regardless of where someone is from, appearances and expectations should always be treated as such, not as the reality.

Both factors, osmolarity and volume, of blood have lasting effects on the body and the functions that occur throughout. Both factors change independent from each other, but work together to maintain an overall homeostasis within the body. For example if an individual were to work out and drank only water then the overall osmolarity of the blood would decrease due to the increase of water. However the volume will not change because the water lost in sweat would be replaced by the water consumed. The change in the osmolarity would lead to a reduction of vasopressin release and an increase in renin production. The renin production increase would promote the reabsorption of sodium, bringing the osmolarity back to an equilibrium state. This is a prime example of independent pathways that work together within the body in order to maintain homeostasis. 

If 3 UV active spots were in the crude material and co-spot TLC plate, and only one spot had the same R_f as the starting material and the other 2 are very different, predictions for the 2 non-starting material spots could be something in the middle of the mechanisms. There are four parts to the mechanism, the one in the middle are the ones that alter the mechanisms. So the second and third part of the mechanism would be the 2 non-starting material spots. This is because of the rate of the hydride attack on the carbon double bonded to the oxygen. It depends heavily on the R group present, and the more electron deficient it is, the faster the hydride can attack. But because they are different from the starting material spot, it would mean that it was caught between and could not fully reduced and go to completion. If it were to be the 1st and 4th instead of the two in the middle steps of this mechanism, it would go through but it will not be full.

P. hydrobothynus is a sexually dimorphic species of otter. The male otters have very large and colorful mane made of orange, yellow, and red and a dark brown body with a white underside. They have a short stocky body, a short fat tail, and a much more robust pectoral girdle. Males are usually only 1 meter long, and 0.35 meters tall. The female otters are dark brown in color with a white underside and are camouflaged in the murky water and muddy banks. The female stellar river otters are built like a traditional river otter and are very streamline with a long wing-like tail, and a longer skinnier body. Females tend to be roughly 1.2 meters long, and are 0.2 m tall. The male and female both have very thick fur to stay dry and for insulation. The two sexes are so morphologically different they were first thought to be different species; however, a distinct red diamond pattern on the chest of this species was the first clue that the discoverers had in determining they were the same species. 

Retinitis pigmentosa is an inherited disease of the retina that affects 1 in 3,500 people and is one of the leading causes of blindness. It was first discovered and diagnosed by According to an NHGRI article “Learning About Retinitis Pigmentosa” (2013), the disease can be diagnosed at age of 10 in most cases. There are different stages of retinitis pigmentosa. Generally, one of the first common signs is the degeneration of the rod cells. This causes the patient to lose their peripheral vision and acquire tunnel vision. On the other hand, some patients’ first symptoms of retinitis pigmentosa include lose of central vision. In both instances, the progressive cone and rod breakdown causes disruption in color perception, night blindness, peripheral and/or central vision. Because of the variability presented by retinitis pigmentosa, not all patients experience these symptoms during their lifetime, and not all patients become completely blind. Unfortunately, this disease cannot be corrected with corrective lenses and there are no known cures (Learning, 2013).

“Learning about Retinitis Pigmentosa.” National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), 27 Dec. 2013, www.genome.gov/13514348/learning-about-retinitis-pigmentosa/#al-5.

After having created a working map for our genomic DNA, identifying our gene of interest and doing extensive research on its possible functions, we needed to perform several experiments to find out more about our gene. The purpose of this lab was to use a reverse genetics approach to explore our Brachypodium distachyon gene of interest and its function by experimenting with mutant and wild type samples. We effectively worked from the mutant phenotype to explore the gene’s function. In doing so, we took several approaches to examine the phenotype, genomic DNA, phylogenetic relationships, and histology of the samples to identify the gene’s possible functions.

Grade and Sieving (2016) investigated the inter-species impacts of eavesdropping on other species calls when exposed to noise pollution, and used alarm calls of tufted titmice, which are similar to chickadees in mobbing behavior. They found that there was a high correlation between noise pollution and inability to detect alarm calls of titmice, suggesting that highways have significant impacts on cardinal, and possibly other passerine survival. Interestingly enough, titmice “Z calls” used to deter predation are similar in frequency and sonographic structure to that of black-capped chickadee mobbing calls, which could provide insights on impacts of similar alarm calls on noise. Our study unwraps this question to explore the intra-species impacts of noise on mobbing behavior. We chose to focus on the black-capped chickadee, since this species is easily identifiable, common, and is incredibly responsive to mobbing behavior. We created a traditional playback experiment to test for the impacts of intra-species communication through mobbing calls in sites with high and low background noise.

The author’s central argument is that killing a fetus is not as morally wrong as killing an adult or a person (contrasts with Marquis). Marquis stated that killing a fetus will deprive it of “a future like ours” which is false. This is because fetuses do not have plans or wishes to do things in its future. Adults have personhood, unlike fetuses. They are thought of as persons and not organisms. There personhood can change throughout their lives and they can develop into different persons. Therefore, an adult is a person and would not be identical to the fetus from which he or she was developed. Lastly, adults also have autonomy while Fetuses lack autonomy. Due to these important disanalogies between killing adults and fetuses, one should not assume that whatever is a sufficient condition for the prima facie serious moral wrongness of killing adults is also a sufficient condition for the prima facie serious moral wrongness of killing fetuses. Thus, the standoff continues between whether personhood is crucial to the morality of abortion or not.