The Nerve Of One Animal

     On the 24th of November, I read an article about Tasmanian Devils and what is happening to them. I was pretty surprised when I found out that they could be extinct in about 30 years. The article was written very well and helped me understand something I never knew.

   

     Tasmanian Devils have a hard time surviving cancer. 70 % of them have already died of which 30% didn't catch cancer. Scientist predict that they might be extinct in the wild in about 30-50 years. Scientist Elizabeth Murchinson, led the study of how to save them. She comes from Tasmania, Australia, and she has been amused by the beauty of the creatures. That is the only place in the world you can find them now. Those mini bears, weigh up to 26 pounds and eat a dead animal every day. The poor creatures, bite each other once a new one has come into the territory. Some might have cancer in the blood cells and they give it to the other Devil. The Tumor is usually found around the mouth which gets bigger and bigger, at one point they cant eat and they starve. To stop this, Scientist are trying to make a vaccine so the animals can be safe. The tumor starts in the Schwann cells that surround nerve fibers. With only this information, you cant understand where the whole cancer comes from. To understand more, scientist looked at healthy and unhealthy cells. The team studied 25 tumors and they had the same genome. To conclude, they said that it all started when one Devil had cancer over 10 years ago. Now they are trying to make a vaccine but that will take about 10 years. Hopefully they can do something about it.

    This story amused me because I think that animals should not die because of a sickness and that we should do something about it. 

If you are interested, you can visit:

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100120/Note3.asp

Some words I found were interesting: 

gene A hereditary unit that determines a particular characteristic in an organism.

genome The total genetic content of an organism; an organism's genetic material.

cancer Any of various diseases with malignant cells, which tend to invade surrounding tissue and spread to new body sites.

axon (or nerve fiber) A threadlike part of a neuron that generally conducts impulses away from the body of the nerve cell.

neuron Any of the impulse-conducting cells that constitute the brain, spinal column and nerves, consisting of a cell body with a nucleus, one or more dendrites (branches that conduct impulses toward the cell body) and a single axon.

myelin A white fatty material that encloses certain axons and nerve fibers. 

Written at: 21:29 24.11.10

Working with Corn

   Science class in ISB is always fun but this time it was awesome. The class was working with corn but not as a solid, it was powder. First, we filled a cup with water and then put some of the corn powder in a bucket and mixed it with water. As I was mixing it, I noticed it was like clay and hard. When it mixed just enough, I tried to pick it up but it didn't work, it became a liquid. I discussed that with my mate and our teacher, she said that this is one of the rare materials that is a solid and a liquid depending of what the pressure is like. So now that we succeeded in the task, we started experimenting and we put some more powder and more water, eventually we put a bit to much water and then it was mostly liquid.Working with this material, was a new experience for me because I never knew that something can be a liquid just as much as a solid. When we finished the experiment, we had to clean up. I took some of the left overs with me and this is how it looks like:

It is in a bag so it wont leak out. The color is the same as when we made it,white. The smell of the corn powder is not the best smell I have ever smelled, it smells like old powder or old cheese. If I touch it, there is a bit of liquid but some of it has became solid. During the next days, I will try to freeze it and will see what happens.

Liquid Experiment

On the 17th of November, 6b started making a small project and used 3 different types of tempered water. The first cup contained ice cold water at the temperature of 5degrees Celsius, the molecules in this water where the closest ones to a solid molecules. This water had the least energy. In the middle was the cup with the room temperatures, 23 degrees Celsius. Last, on the right side was the warm water which was at 56 degrees Celsius. Something I learned was that, density is all about space and mass and temperature is the measurement of kinetic energy. As we had everything prepared, we put food coloring into all 3 cups and observed. In the warm one, the food coloring diffused very fast and everywhere. In the normal water, some of the coloring stayed in the top and some in the bottom, last it started compressing against each other and joined which caused the whole cup to be covered with the coloring. When we did it for the cold one, all the food coloring instantly dropped down to the bottom. What happen during the process was evaporation and condensation. The most important thing we were looking for was the density and how it effects what is going on. Once you put the food coloring into water it will became the same temperature as the water. After all, looking at different conclusions for different types of water and temperature was fun and made me think as a scientist.

Deet of the sea

                                                       by Rachel Ehrenberg
                                                   Written by Alexandra Lysicanova
                                                   Published post at 20:26. 17.11.

   The world we know of is a peaceful under water world. But it's not. Just as there are enemies on Earth there are little blood-sucking mosquitoes down there. These mosquitoes are called isopods.Scientist also found out that to protect them selves, the coral reef fish wrap into mucus before going to sleep. Some reasons that they cover in mucus are that they want to be safe, not attract the moray eels and the isopods. To have more clues of what is happening, scientist from the University of Queensland in Austria have done some work and experiments. First of all, they gathered some of the coral reef fish and put them in a tube. They waited until midnight so the fish could make their cocoons. After all the fish were sleeping the scientists removed the cocoon from some of the fish and left the other ones alone. Finally they placed some isopods into the tubes and 94 percent of the fish without the cocoon got bitten. 10 percent of the fish weren't bitten because they were covered in cocoon and that was the challenge for the enemies.The fish produce the cocoon from their mouth and it takes one hour to make it go on their whole body. This process take up 2.5 of their body energy. Once the fish have started this cycle they will be more safe and will have a better underwater life.

 I choose to write about this article because I like to know about what is new about animals. I also thought it was interesting reading this article because I never knew that there existed underwater mosquitoes and that fish have to protect their selves.

Some interesting words that I found were:
Snot: mucus from the nose
Isopods: marine mosquitoes

This is how a coral reef fish looks once it's covered in mucus.
If you would like to discover more go on to:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/65567/title/DEET_of_the_sea

Reflection about glog

As i made m glog and researched about glaciers, I learned about new things. I was trying to answer: what are glaciers? How are they formed? Where do they form? What would happen if glaciers would melt? What do they help us with? What are the effects? By listening to my class mates and making my glog, I finally had an answer to all of my questions. You can find all of my answer on my glog post if you scroll down. Studying about glacier helped me get a clearer idea about what our world is about. I learned how much of the world's atmosphere is covered in ice, this can help me also with geography. I think that if someone was about to write about glacier they should be ready for a lot of information and make sure they know everything because it might help in the future. After all, studying about glacier made my learning skills a bit better and now i know a lot of facts that i didn't before.

Mixtures

     I have been trying to research about mixtures for quite a long time now I should say. My two main questions I was asking myself were, what are the main types of mixtures? What makes them different? I learned a lot of new things and i hope you will as well.
  
     Mixtures are substances held together by physical forces. Anything you can combine is a mixture and that should be pretty clear because of the word "mix". There are heterogeneous and homogeneous. You might not know what the difference is what they are, so here I go.
HOMOGENEOUS:
used to describe substances that look the same throughout. For example when you make Tang which is a powder which you mix with water, if you mix it very well it will be a homogeneous which means you wont be able to see the particles so simply you couldn't separate them. The mixture got its name from: "homo" which mean sameness.Here is a site that might help you visualize it more: 
http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/106Amixture.html

HETEROGENEOUS:
used to describe substances in which you can see more than one color or type of matter.For example, if you read my mixture which is the post under, mixing cereals with milk is a heterogeneous because you can separate the cereals from the milk. Also if you put a raisin in water it will not dissolve and you can always separate them.The world heterogeneous come from "hetero" which mean different.On the site which is under homogeneous you can find a picture of heterogeneous mixtures and how you can see the difference.
 
      Now that you know those two types of mixtures there are eve smaller mixtures that are mixture of either homogeneous or heterogeneous. These are:

• Solutions
• Emulsions
• Suspensions
• Colloidal Dispersions

SOLUTIONS:
  
   are mixtures by mixing a solute and a solvent. Solute is the substance that dissolves, solvent is the substance that does the dissolving. Solutions are homogeneous. An example of a solution mixture is water and salt. The water is the solvent and the salt is the solute.This is a site for solutions: 
http://www.chem4kids.com/files/matter_solution.html

SUSPENSIONS:
     are heterogeneous mixtures of a solid and a liquid in which the solid does not dissolve. This is like the cereals and milk. The solid which in that case are the cereals don't dissolve.

EMULSIONS:
  this mixture consists of two liquids that do not mix. Emulsions will settle into layers when they are left standing undisturbed. For example oil and water is an emulsion.

COLLOIDAL DISPERSIONS:
  mixtures with characteristics between a solution and a suspension.They are heterogeneous. They do not settle.


These are the major mixtures. It may be hard to remember but after all once you make some food and someone asks you what type of mixture it is you say: "It is ..."  

My mixture

   As my classmates and I have studied about the topic of mixtures we were assigned an assignment which was to make our own mixture. The mixture had to be something we liked to eat or drink. I chose to do my mixture with cereals and milk. I eat it every morning and it is delicious. The ingredients you need are: milk and cereals, and the objects are a bowl and a spoon or what ever you eat it with. The procedure i followed was: I find my cereals and my bowl followed with the milk. 2) I put some cereals into the bowl.3) I pour the milk in.4) I mix the cereals with my spoon so they taste better. Last i eat. It is that easy and you will love it. As I was making it, my observations were that as I mixed the milk with the cereals I noticed that the cereals stayed on top and didn't disappear. But after a while, they were getting more squished and probably if i didn't eat it for a long time the cereals might disappear. This mixture is a suspension because in the mixture was a liquid and a solid, and the solid did not dissolve. After all, you should also test if it really is a suspension or not and the benefit is that you will get delicious food to eat.

                                        Mini-machines that move without batteries

By: Stephen Ornes
Visited on: 10.11.10


          A new invention has been created, one that every one is talking about. In a laboratory at John Hopking University scientist have created a new machine. You might be wondering why is that news? Well it is simply because of two main facts. First of all, the machines work without batteries and second of all, they are smaller than mosquitoes. The leader of this project was David Gracias. He is known as a scientist that works on miniaturization which are small objects which in this case is the machine.This new invention can be useful for medicine and for removing parts of the tissue. Also for helping cancer. Last but not least, they can give small amount of drugs to disease parts in the human body. So as i said before, the machine doesn't work on batteries but on biology. The machine can be inspired by nature but of course you will not find any machines growing there.
         How is the machine made?
        First of all, the machine has a base layer of silicon- also used for computer chips. On top of that, are placed 3 different types of metal: Chromium, nickel and gold. The last thing they add are layers of polymers which are big molecules of many atoms. The machines have tiny fingers made to grab things and once it has something it looks like a palm. 
       While making the machine, Gracias tested different polymers: one is from collagen which keeps the human body together and the second one is from cellulose found in the cell walls of plant cells.Before even exhibiting the invention the scientist tested the machine in various ways until now the whole world knows. The goal of this invention, is that one day hopefully the machine can fight against cancer. “In nature, and in us, these [machines] respond to chemistry,” Gracias told Science News.
    Sometimes when I think about this discovery, i really hope it will work with saving people from cancer because connected for me my grandfather has cancer so this is something that could have helped him if it would have been invented a bit before.
    I choose to write and study about this topic because it is something that is related to me in a way and because it is an interesting topic.
 If you are interested the web is:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64362/title/FOR_KIDS_Minimachines_that_move_without_batteries
Some words are:

enzyme Any of numerous proteins produced by living organisms and that help with chemical reactions.
polymer Any of numerous natural and synthetic compounds of high molecular weight consisting of up to millions of repeated linked units, each a relatively light and simple molecule.
collagen The fibrous protein constituent of bone, cartilage, tendon and other connective tissue. It is converted into gelatin by boiling.
cellulose A complex carbohydrate that forms the main part of the cell wall in most plants. It is also important in the manufacture of numerous products, such as paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals and explosives.