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My name is Ryan DiGregorio and I am a junior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am on the pre-med track but my major is Biology. I am from Norton, Massachusetts which is in eastern mass. Things that I do in my spare time are usually based around sports and friends. I play baseball or any other sport my friends are interested in, and when I’m not playing sports I am just hanging out with my friends. My favorite thing about UMass Amherst so far has been how diverse it is. My home town is small and not very diverse so this definitely something new and exciting to me. Some important strengths of my generation are staying informed and being tech savvy. Something that I think our generation needs to improve on is focusing on the future. I feel as though people focus too much on what is happening now and not what the effect on their future will be.  

My name is Ryan DiGregorio and I am a freshman here at UMass Amherst. I am on the pre-med track but my major is undecided. I am from Norton, Massachusetts which is in eastern mass. Things that I do in my spare time are usually based around sports and friends. I play baseball or another sport if my friends want, and when I’m not playing sports I am just hanging out with my friends. My favorite thing about UMass Amherst so far has been how diverse it is. My home town is small and not very diverse so this definitely something new and exciting to me. Some important strengths of my generation are staying informed and being tech savvy. Something that i think our generation needs to improve on is focusing on the future. I feel as though people focus too much on what is happening now and not what the effect on their future will be.  

The goal of this project was to great a methods and a figure from an interspecific relationship so as a classmate could recreate it. The relationship that I chose to use was between feeding time and my cat. The figures were of a photo of the cat with its food bowl, as well as a picture of the bowl itself. Many differences arose in the figures that were both from making the figure and the contents within the figure. These could easily have been qualmed if the methods that I provided were more detailed and formed better.

The actual contents of the figure showed differences to figure 1. The first and most noticeable difference would be that the cats have different markings. The cat in figure 1 had gray and black coloring with dark gray stripes. The cat in figure 2 has gray, black, white and a bit of brown. Also the hair appeared to be different as well. From these differences it's safe to make the assumption that the cats are different. This was expected as she did not come over and take pictures of specifically my cat, but this did not hamper the experiment as it should have worked with any cat. The same thing applies to the background of the photo; these pictures were taken in our apartments respectively so they were bound to be different. The evidence that lead me to this conclusion is that the flooring underneath the bowls are different, one is wood and one is tiled. Also the carpets are different colors and patterns so they rooms were different.

In the Spring of 2019 we were assigned a project in Writing in Biology as part of my undergraduate work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This class was set up to challenge our writing and to make sure we wrote like true scientists. In every paper done in science the goal is to make a sure that the the experiment can be recreated and the results remain consistent time after time. One of the most important ways experiments have communicated to others is through the methods section. The methods section should explain the exact things that took place in the experiment so that someone else can recreate it.

DNA-DNA hybridization is a method used to estimate the amount of genetic changes that took place in the genome as a whole since the time at which two groups diverged from their most closest ancestor. The 4 nucleotides has 4 unique base A, C, G, and T, these base pairs would allow scientists to analyze how similar each species are to one another. Fred Sheldon was one of the pioneers to perform this experiment and he confirmed that Great Blue Heron is similar to Great Egret than American Bittern.

Fish use body undulations to swim, which create water movement with great acceleration behind the fish. The form of this wave is similar among most fish, however waves vary in number, speed, and amplitude change. There is little known about how the center of mass (COM) of fish changes with swimming speed. However, it is known that the COM can change in three dimensions: surge, sway, and heave. The COM of three fish were calculated. Surge COM displacement and acceleration in eels and bluegill sunfish oscillated at twice the tail beat frequency, while the sway COM displacement and acceleration oscillated at the tail beat frequency. Surge COM oscillations did not change with swimming speed, while sway oscillations increased with increasing swimming speed. Sway amplitudes increased with increased swimming speed in bluegill sunfish, but the same was not true for the eels. 

The Clicker question that I chose asked what characters of an atom determine the magnitude and duration of a charge. The options that were given to choose from were size, weight, density, and electronegativity. The correct answer would be electronegativity. Electronegativity is the measure of how strong the atom is attracted to its outer substituents. The higher the electronegativity the more it is attracted. So, the charge is determined by this because if an atom bonds with something that will allow it to be positive or negative and it has a high electronegativity; the atom will keep the bonds for longer. Also, the more electronegative atom will pull the electrons in the bond closer which will determine the magnitude of the charge. Size does not tell us anything about the bonds of the atom or the makeup of it so that doesn’t work as an answer. It’s the same thing for the weight, it does not tell us anything about how it will interact with other atoms. The density will tell you some about the internal forces of the atom but it has nothing to do with charge and it definitely can’t express the magnitude or duration.

The question that I chose to answer was “If the forward reaction is favorable in a cell, what is the rate?”. The answer choices for this question were either fast, slow, or not enough information. The answer choice that works for this question would be that there is not enough information. This makes sense because the question does not tell you anything about rate. There could be different ways that the reaction is favorable but this has nothing to do with the rate. The rate is more based on the enzyme or substrate concentration. The temperature can also have something to do with this. Since these things are not specified there is not enough information to tell you whether it is fast or slow.