Drafts

Cancer is very scary, however it’s mechanics are incredibly interesting. A cell acquires a mutation that causes it to bypass multiple checkpoints in cell division and divide uncontrollably. The scary part about cancer is that it can happen anywhere and in any tissue. Cancer can also happen for any reason at all. You can be the most healthy person in the world and your cells can make a mistake which leads to uncontrollable division. The worst part is your body doesn’t know to target these cells. Your body provides the cells with energy for them to divide at expedited rates. Your body can’t tell them apart because they are technically your cells, there is nothing that jumps out at the immune system and says hey we aren’t supposed to be here. There are really good drugs to combat cancer. But even with modern techniques and medicine it is still incredibly hard for cancer to be completely beat. And even if the cancer is beat it can come back or it can even come back in a different location of the body. It is honestly incredible that with the amount the cells in our body divide that more cancerous mutations do not develop at all.

German Shepards should be saved with the vaccine. Like many other breeds, they can be household companions that are known for their loyalty to their owner. Many german shepards love their owners so much that they might have separation anxiety after being away from them. The devotion of german shepards to their owners makes it easy for them to make a valuable, inseparable bond to their owner. For this reason, I think we should choose German Shepherds to save. They possess qualities that make humans feel more loved and less lonely. Not only are German Shepards a man’s best friend, but they also have valuable skills that can be exploited to assist humans. Their vigilance, obedience, and ability to focus makes them a good candidate as service dogs. In addition, they are often used by the police to sniff out drugs or human remains.

One of the coolest videos I have ever seen in a science course was in highschool. It was a timelapse video of a seal that had died getting eaten by other animals in a coral reef. Within a minutes small animals started picking away at the carcass then a few bigger animals passed by and took big chunks out of the seal. The coolest part of the video for me was seeing the starfish walk over and begin to eat the seal carcass. I didn’t even know that starfish were carnivorous, now thinking about it though it makes sense that they are. I managed to find the video on youtube to rewatch it. It really is incredible how the organisms in the coral reef don’t let a carcass go to waste. There was another really cool video of a whale carcass that had fallen to the bottom of the sea. Sharks had clearly taken big pieces before it even hit the ocean floor. Once it did deeper dwelling sharks began to take pieces of whale then came the eels. The eels ate away at the carcass until only bones remained. The circle of life was really beautifully captured in both of these videos. In death these animals gave other life.

In the study, “Complex movement patterns by foraging loggerhead sea turtles outside the breeding season identified using Argos-linked Fastloc-Global Positioning System” by Antoine M. Dujon and colleagues, the coastal foraging of loggerhead sea turtles was observed. The goal of this study was to gain further information on how loggerhead sea turtles use different neritic foraging sites at multiple scales. Using Argos-linked Fastloc-Global Positioning System, 24 turtles were tracked and recorded. These turtles were selected from a group of 57 turtles that had been tracked due to the duration and multilocational movements. They were monitored for a mean of 6.0 (+/- 4.5) months in the Adriatic Sea and Gulf of Gabes. The two different scales used were site and patch level. Site level being defined as non-overlapping large-scale habitats, and path level being defined as high-use areas within sites. The patches used in a site were similar in nearshore and offshore sites.

The assumed myristic acid was analyzed using hydrolysis and then by melting point. The melting point of the product was found to be 53 °C. This is slightly lower than the expected melting point of myristic acid of 54.4 °C however found within a narrow range alluding that the product may have been relatively pure. The yield obtained for myristic acid was 86.6% which is rather high. This relatively high yield may have been obtained by not adding excess liquid because adding too much liquid would result in loss.

    Have you ever stopped to consider just how much we are affected by marketing everyday? Back in 2011, it’s estimated that the number of advertisements we see a day are at least 500, if not more. They can be subtle, such as the logo on someone’s shoes, versus something that’s very obvious, such as a billboard or a TV commercial. There are some brands that even utilize the fact that they’re hard to distinguish, and maximize that secrecy to make their brand stand out, such as Acne studios. We’re constantly exposed to different brands and marketing tactics and are never consciously aware of it. Take a look at headphones specifically. What is the first pair of headphones that comes to your mind when you think of the word “headphones”? Most people think of Beats by Dre, but other examples include Sony, Bose, or HyperX. These are the 4 main headphone brands that are dominating the market, yet the one that’s selling the most (by far) is Beats by Dre. This is due to the fact that their marketing team is heavily focused upon, and their brand name was able to score a deal with Apple, who also value marketing heavily. By making Beats such a widely known brand, people associate Beats as “very great headphones”, even though the reality is that they’re purposely weighted for no good reason, and the bass is amplified for every song that goes through them. They’re honestly a very awful pair of headphones for their price tag, yet they still dominate the market because of how widely known they are.

Topocloning is a faster and more efficient version of  traditional cloning. Cloning is the process by which a DNA sequence of interest is integrated into a vector plasmid. This is done traditionally by cutting the plasmid with a restriction enzyme and then ligating either end of the sequence to the open ends of the plasmid. The ligation step is typically performed by an enzyme called ligase. The use of two different enzymes in two different steps makes the traditional cloning method ineffective. Many errors occur using this method. The advent of topocloning has circumvented the use of two enzymes, by the use of a single enzyme called topoisomerase 1. The vector comes open with two toposiomerase 1 enzymes on either end of the open vector. Once the sequence of interest comes into the gap, the topoisomerase 1 enzymes catalyze the ligation step, closing up the vector and integrating the appropriate sequence into the vector.

    Mating calls of male Dog Day Cicadas are used to attract female partners. Research has shown that Dog Day Cicadas, one of the most common species of cicadas found in the United States, use a specific mating call in order to attract females in hopes of performing reproduction. The sound that is created by the panels beneath their wings, known as tymbals. The panels vibrate rapidly, and is then intensified by the cicada’s mostly hollow abdomen. The main mating call is a high-pitched drone that lasts about 15 seconds. It starts softly and gradually grows louder in a crescendo, and then tapers off by the end. The sound is eerily similar to the sound of an electric saw. Yet female and male cicadas can also create sounds using their wings, but this sound is different and distinct. We would like to determine whether or not this signal is also a part of the mating call, or is instead used in a different manner. Cicadas are not known for communicating anything other than their desire to mate, and our team would like to determine what else are Dog Day Cicadas singing about. We would be able to gather data from the Texas A&M Forest Services, the studies done by the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and other research journals done by the University of California, Irvine.

What the author means by hologenomic approach is that they are not only taking into acount the genome of the vampire bites but they are also looking into the microbiome to compare it to other types of bats. The word sanguivory means that the bats feed on blood which comes with some challenges. The challenges that they face consist of a lack of nutrition. There is not a lot of nutritious value in having a diet of blood. Also a diet of just blood means that the bats are then exposed to blood bourne viruses that can make them fall ill. However the microbiome of vampire bats is different then that of an insectivorous bat, carnivorous bat, or frugivourous bat. The vampire bat has a stomach filled with certain enzymes that allow it to break down its blood and get nutrients which then contributes to the fitness of the bat itself.

Ethical considerations primarily focus on the effects on future generations. Relating to gene editing concerning athletes, a current controversy regards whether we should be allowed to use these methods to enhance our own abilities. The use of genome editing in somatic cells raises some concerns due to the array of unpredictable outcomes that accompany gene editing (Krishan et al. 2015). Many are in favor of genome editing when it concerns the elimination of certain diseases. Yet, many are against the idea of altering the DNA of embryos, citing it as crossing an ethical line. This is due to the possibility of newly created diseases developing due to DNA insertion from CRISPR-Cas9 in locations other than the target site (Cyranoski 2015).