Today's final Science Solutions blog assignment is to compare and contrast sexual and asexual methods of reproduction. We are currently studying human reproduction and we have studied asexual reproduction in the past, so I think I have enough information to write this blog post.

Sexual reproduction occurs when two organisms use their sexual organs to reproduce and combine their genes to make a different organisms. Almost all animals do this, including humans. You inherited genes from your parents when they reproduced.

In asexual reproduction, one organism does all the work. Because their are no other genes to combine with theirs, the daughter organism is identical to the parent one since it has the same genes. Some very basic organisms reproduce this way, but humans are not basic enough to.

In organisms that reproduce sexually, there is much more genetic variation than in those who do not, obviously. Thanks to sexual reproduction, people are not all exactly the same! However, asexual and sexual reproduction do have certain things in common. For example, genetic information forms in a similar way in both. Here's a helpful diagram that should make these similarities and differences easier to understand.

Good Tuesday. Today's Science Solutions blog assignment is to hypothesize that by some astronomical chance, a hospital decides to hire us as a surgeon. Explain how the frog dissection we did last week in Science class might help us appreciate or prepare us for the job of a surgeon.

I only did the first part of last week's dissection, so I only got to cut through layers of the frog's flesh and muscles and see just part of its insides. This makes my knowledge limited, but I still think what I did helped me further appreciate what a surgeon does. 

The first thing I can think of off the top of my head is that it helped me realize even more that what a surgeon does is gross! Not only were the dead frogs creepy, they also didn't smell very good. Neither did their guts. It must take a lot of experience and not so much squeamishness to do what a surgeon gets paid to do.

The next obvious thing that would help me appreciate a surgeon's job was that I got experience with dissecting something and the procedures and steps of doing that. The anatomy of a frog is different from a person's, of course, but we share some organs, bones, and body parts with them. It was sort of like operating on a tiny, green, misshapen human. We got previews of all of the frog's body systems and their organ systems. The diagrams and drawings in our froguts.com packet helped us with that part of the dissection. When becoming a surgeon, I assume that students have to do a lab or labs like this in which they dissect a type of animal. It would be really scary to have a surgeon operating on you that had no experience dissecting things that weren't human, and it would be scary to be a surgeon assigned a task of operation on a person when I had no experience dissecting things at all. This is just what I think about things.

Happy Memorial Tuesday! We did not have school yesterday, so there was no Math Monday prompt. Instead, we were given this one. Today's Science Solutions blog assignment is to explain the pathway that light takes to get to our eye starting from the cornea and ending with the brain.

When light hits our eye, it goes through the cornea and makes its way quickly to the lens of our eye. "Lens" comes from a Latin root that means "light", and as you might have been able to tell, it is what processes light. After going through the lens, the light goes through our eyeball at its signature speed until it becomes a signal. This signal is perceived by our brain as heat or color. Our minds, however, can only see and process a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum of light. It uses this specified process to "read" the light. The signal spreads around your brain to let you know that what you're seeing is color. Sight is one of five senses, and in reality, all five of the senses are perceived by our brain because of the signals they trigger. Our brain works incredibly fast to have all five senses intact. 

This blog prompt actually ties in with our previous unit, which was on light and optics. I wasn't here for the test, so I have to take it tomorrow. This is one of my favorite things to learn about in science and it always has been. Like other concepts and material we've learned in Science, this subject can tie into many other ones. The mechanics of the brain are under the topics of neuroscience and neurology, even though we were studying optics at the time that we learned this. Another cool part about learning this sort of thing was the dissection we did a few weeks ago. We found an example of this principle using the eye of a sheep. Their eyes are built in a way that is similar to ours, and their brains send signals the same way that ours do. Right now we're doing another dissection, only this one does not tie into a greater unit; we're finding out how the inside of a frog works by doing a virtual and then a literal dissection. 

Good Wednesday! Today's off-schedule Science Solutions blog assignment is to reflect on yesterday's field trip to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. We are to explain what we learned about our animal and if going to the zoo changed our perspective of it.

Well, the field trip was nice in some regards, but in the respect of actual learning about a specific animal, it was kind of disappointing. I loved going around to various exhibits and learning about other animals, but the plecostomus, my group's animal, didn't even have an exhibit. We think we might have found a spotted one in part of the rainforest exhibit, but there was no display information, and the zookeeper who was there informed us that they didn't know the fish's classification information. That kind of left the window open to curiosity, I guess, but I'm still unsure of whether it was a pleco or not.

I don't know how the lack of plecos at the zoo will affect our grade, but I have an uneasy feeling it might. Mrs. Poole explained to us that she already knew that certain animals couldn't be found at the zoo and to just go with the rest of our group, whose animals were the domestic alpaca and a type of peccary. So in that way, going to the zoo didn't change my perspective on my animal very much at all. Most of the fun yesterday was seeing the other animals and learning about them, as well as doing the many stations; I thought a lot of those were really cool!! We didn't focus on learning about animals all year in science, but I saw some hints about adaptations and evolutions in the information given at some of the stations. Overall, going to the zoo was educational and fun, even if a bit of a letdown in some respects. There are certain things about the field trip and project that I think could have been fixed, but some made the unit overall very memorable and rewarding. For the rest of this week we'll continue working on our zoo website and adding more information about the plecostomus to it. Unfortunately, I don't think that will change much. The value of our understanding, however, was improved on by the efforts of ourselves and our teachers, and I cannot thank them enough for that!!!!!!!!!!

Happy... Wednesday! Today's Science Solutions blog prompt is to explain how rainbows form and why they look the way they do.

Yesterday when I was in the library instead of CST testing, I looked up the answer in a book about optics. Basically, the answer is that the gases in the sky reflect off of the clear water droplets (rain), recreating a spectrum in the shape of a perfect half-circle in the sky. This is the same principle that we see applied in the famous picture of a prism refracting light. Of course, as with all colors, a rainbow has no infinite form and we only see it as such because it is all our eyes allow us to see. Make any sense?

This ties into the current unit we're studying, which is Chapter 3 and focuses on light and optics. In addition to learning the basics of color and light on the electromagnetic spectrum, we've also studied eyeballs and their functions a bit. In fact, on Monday, we dissected and examined a sheep's eyeball. Our test on the chapter is huge for our fourth-quarter Science grade, and it's this Friday! Yikes! I've already studied some of this, so really, I'm trying to become more well-versed on the subject.  Optics is really interesting to me. It seems small and hard to understand, but the functions of our eyes and the way we see and perceive light and things like rainbows and mirrors are all actually quite important. 

Good morning! Today's Science Solutions blog entry is to explain, without doing any research previously, why the sky is blue.

In short, the sky is blue because of reflecting light on the electromagnetic spectrum. If you didn't already know, light and waves come on a huge spectrum, ranked by wavelength and frequency of waves. Only a small part of that spectrum is visible to humans. Our brains register the light waves as color. There are seven primary colors of light that make up a rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. When an object appears to us as a certain color, it means that while all of the light waves are hitting it, it's only reflecting the light in the color we see. Basically, the sky is blue because it is absorbing light that we'd see as red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, or violet. It's reflecting the light that our brain tells us is blue. This principle goes for anything that you see as a certain color. For example, the construction paper I'm facing is absorbing light that isn't yellow and reflecting the yellow light into my eyes. If an object is black, it means that there is an absence of light waves hitting it and it appears dark and colorless. White light and color is the result of all of the colors in the visible light spectrum blending together to make one lighter color. 

I didn't do any research for this specifically as we were instructed not to, but it comes from what we've been learning in science the past two weeks. We're studying optics, or the study of light and color. The unit has a lot of vocabulary and "Why is the sky blue?" is actually one of them. To be more detailed, the sky reflects the blue light because of the gases in the atmosphere and the ozone layer. Other planets and satellites don't have that type of protection from the sun's radiation, so their skies would appear a different color to us if we were on them. Some planets, such as Saturn, have atmospheres, but no ozone layers. Saturn's sky would look orange to us if it were ever possible to stand on it, but that's an entirely different field of science. It's interesting to me how they tend to cross over into each other.

Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to Science Solutions! Our blog assignment for today is to explain what we think the greatest scientific discovery in history was and why. Today is a four-day week as we had last week and yesterday off for spring/Easter vacation and Cesar Chavez day.

In my opinion, the greatest scientific discovery was probably Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Even though there were important discoveries that came before it, I feel like it was fundamentally important because it provided a basis and prelude for anthropologic and historical studies. Knowing where we came from is a big element of history, and when we added science to it, more and more historical knowledge became more clear and sensical. I believe in evolution since so many things around us fit into the theory and tell us that it makes sense.

Darwin's discovery set in motion a timeline of the Earth that most people use today. If it weren't for his hard work and studying, modern geology and biology wouldn't make any sense or would be unbeknownst to people. Our psychological behavior would be more covered up and would make much less sense for anyone. Even the bodily systems and the study of anatomy fit in with Darwin's theory. So do the discoveries of other scientists in the fields of natural selection and genetic mutations. Past discoveries like the Big Bang theory also compliment Darwin's work. Together they provide a base that we can add more scientific learnings as well as human history and communications on. That's why we study them and all of the big scientific discoveries.

This is not to say that Darwin's theory could stand on its own. We know more about the theory now than Charles Darwin did at his time. We can prove it to be more true than we previously thought by using the works of other scientists like those who discovered the secret of DNA or mutations. There are fundamental things that we need to know before others and use in our studies and discoveries in order to make our knowledge layered and concise. Scientific knowledge as we know it is rather like a patchwork, and without one significant discovery, it would all make less or little sense. I don't think that there is ever enough to know and we should keep using discoveries from the past to enrich our scientific learning of the world around us.

Happy Tuesday! Today's Science Solutions blog entry is to explain, in our own words, why temperate climate fossils have been found in Antarctica.

We're not specifically learning about this right now, but it is related to evolution and geology both. To answer the prompt, fossils from certain climates have been found in radically different ones because of plate tectonics and separations. A long time ago, all of the continents were one mass called Pangaea. Several million years ago, Pangaea began to spread apart. A very long time later the continents eventually separated into the seven current ones. Animals existed and evolved during the periods of continental mass, but did not survive and eventually evolved and adapted to their new climates. The ice ages froze the earth over and made climates colder as they pushed further and further apart. 

https://docs.google.com/a/edisoncomputech.com/forms/d/1VIP9Ydf-b9TyFnjb_RlMtWdc8ZfDYcN5Rfw4agkrXYg/viewform

Happy Tuesday! Today's Science Solutions blog entry for today is to review on a tool we have used in Science class, Quizlet, and explain how or how not it has helped us to study.

At the beginning of each unit, we create a set of flash cards on Quizlet that list the vocabulary terms for the chapter. Mrs. Poole checks it at the end of the unit, but we are welcome to use the list any time during it to study. Once we have created our flash cards, there are a few games and practice exercises available for us to do. We can learn how to spell the terms with audio, learn the definitions through games like Space Race, and even take a pre-test on the terms. We personalize our flash cards and set viewing settings to private so that our flash cards are special to us.

I've noticed that a lot of my peers only create the Quizlet flash card set without actually using it to study or practice. I think Quizlet is a pretty effective method, but many students are not putting effort into using it, which is why their test grades drop. I can't name any other, more effective ways to help learn vocabulary terms, so my solution is just to encourage students even more. If Quizlet had a point system or was worth extra credit if extra goals were reached, it could motivate the kids to want to use it as a study method. I believe that if we used Quizlet for more classes, more pupils might be drawn to using it to study for Science, too. 

To summarize my points, Quizlet works for me and others because it itself is effective and a good study method. The fault lies within students who don't put enough effort or time into their work.

Happy Thursday! It is Late Start Day, or LSD, but it is an unusual Thursday. Instead of Core Concentration, we are writing a Science Solutions blog entry post since we had the writing test on Tuesday and chose that day to write our history blog. Anyways, the assignment for today is to write about who or what contributed and helped Charles Darwin in constructing his theory of evolution and natural selection. We have already wrapped up our unit on this material, so we have plenty of knowledge of it.

Lots of research is what formed the basis of Darwin's theory. He traveled around the world finding evidence of evolution and changes in species relating to climate and adaptation. He wrote his findings in his journal to keep them fresh in his mind. Eventually he began working them into a book later in his life. However, Darwin did not formulate this theory alone. He was influenced by and used publications by other scientists and naturalists such as Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus, especially when researching natural selection and adaptation of species. For example, both of the above published scientific novels about selection and Thomas Malthus termed "selective breeding". Darwin was the one who named "natural selection" and used principles discovered by Malthus to explain that selection occurs in nature, too. It should be known that not all of Charles Darwin's work was based on his instincts and intellect, but most of it was original and ingenious. In a way, it was almost as if Darwin had worked alongside scientists to create the complex theory.

I said previously that Darwin published his book explaining what evolution and natural selection were later in his life. This was due to his wife, who encouraged him to get the word of his findings and thoughts out. He had previously been hesitant to expose his ideas to the world because he did not want speculation of his being a heretic or non-believer out.