Wilson's Disease
Wilson's disease is a rare inherited disorder that causes too much copper to accumulate in your liver, brain, and other vital organs.  Symptoms typically become conspicuous during the ages of 12 to 23.  Wilson's disease causes a wide variety of symptoms, which causes it to be mistaken for other diseases, and may vary from person to person.  Some symptoms include the following: lack of appetite, fatigue, or abdominal pain; jaundice (the yellowing of the skin and whites of the eyes); a tendency to bruise easily; fluid buildup in the legs or abdomen; problems with speech, swallowing, or physical coordination; and uncontrolled movements or muscle stiffness.  Wilson's disease is inherited as an autosomal recessive trait, and is found on chromosome number 13.  Early onset of the disease may foretell a worse prognosis than later onset.  If the disorder is detected early and treated appropriately, an individual with Wilson's Disease can usually enjoy normal health and a normal lifestyle.  However, if not treated, Wilson's Disease can cause brain damage, liver failure, and death.  The treatment has to be lifelong, too.  Wilson's disease is pretty rare, affecting only 1 in 30,000 individuals.  That gene that Wilson's Disease affects is in the ATP7B gene, which is a part of the 13 chromosome, as mentioned earlier.  This gene provides instructions for making a protein called copper-transporting ATPase 2, which plays a role in the transport of copper from the liver to other parts of the body and when copper is found in excessive amounts, it can be toxic.  Mutations in the ATP7B gene prevent the transport protein from functioning properly.  With a shortage of functional protein, excess copper is not removed from the body.  As a result, copper accumulates to toxic levels that can damage tissues and organs, particularly the liver and brain.
 
 One common symptom of Wilson's disease is the brown ring, which is pointed out by the arrows.  Since many people may not know they have the disease, I wasn't able to find a famous person who possesses the disease.

Project Blog 1
So far, things seem to be going fairly well with our project.  We aren't very far into our experiment yet, so we haven't seen any drastic advancements or detrimental effects, which is good.  From what we've seen, the euglena looks the way it did when we first viewed it under the microscope.  However, one thing we've stumbled across was the water evaporating in the glasses.  This wasn't surprising and we expected this to happen, but the issue with that is with the loss of water, we aren't exactly sure how much water we should add in comparison to how much sugar we should add to keep a steady ratio similar to what we had when we started.  Even though our sugar measurements weren't exactly the same in our first measurement, they were very similar and if we were to add more water and sugar, we'd run the risk of potentially diluting the sugars, or adding too much sugar causing the euglena to overeat.  If I had to predict what was going to happen in our experiment, I would say that the sugars would help speed up the reproduction process of euglena.  Although we haven't seen too many drastic changes, there was a larger area of of green in one of the sugars, but the exact one I fail to remember.


This is how we setup our experiment, and we store it under constant light when we aren't present.

Pond Water
There were a lot of interesting things that were found and my partner and I recognized seven total organisms in our drop of pond water but unfortunately, I cannot remember a majority of them.  The ones I do remember include a roundworm and a type of euglena, but the exact classification of euglena I do not recall.  However, I found it incredible that my partner and I found and recognized seven different species in just a droplet of water, and this doesn't include the other organisms that moved through the microscope that we couldn't recognize in time before something else came along.  What was even more amazing was the fact that it didn't take very long for an organism to move or swim into the view of the microscope.  I was expecting it to be a couple minutes to see something, but if we waiting about 30 to 45 seconds, there was an organism treading along at it's leisure.  What makes me wonder is all of the cool organisms scientists can see when they have an even bigger drop of water, especially considering we found various different species in not even an ounce of water.  The organism I am going to describe will be the roundworm.  The scientific name for this creature is Nematoda.  There are over 12,000 recognized species of roundworm, but scientists think there are many more different kinds out there.  Roundworms are typically found in almost every sea, freshwater bodies, and on land, but some have very specific habitats, such as non-parasitic nematodes are adapted to swimming along the bottoms of streams and lakes.  Many roundworms are predatory carnivores and contain teeth, and typically feed on organic matter, algae, fungi, bacteria, or even other worms.  Mating between roundworms usually happens between a male and a female.  Some predators of the roundworm include crayfish, flatworms, and nemertean worms.













If you look closely, you can see a roundworm in the upper left part of the microscope that I took in class during our activity.

DNA discovery, structure, and replication
In this activity, we learned how DNA was discovered, and it was in a strange fashion.  There were two people who became famous for discovering DNA, and they were Watson and Crick.  However, a man named Wilkins showed them the picture, but from where did he obtain the picture?  The first picture taken of DNA was courtesy of a woman named Franklin.  Even though she took the picture, she received no credit, and many believed it do be from a sexist point of view and people didn't want to award a woman.  To show how DNA is configured, we constructed our very own DNA model with candy! We used licorice as the sugar and phosphorous part of the model, which is where the DNA twists, and gummy bears and chewy jolly ranchers to represent A=T and C=G.  One combination of a bond included a green jolly rancher bonded--which was represented by toothpicks--with a red gummy bear, while the other bond included an orange gummy bear and a red jolly rancher.  Once the class put together one DNA model, our next objective turned out to be splitting our original model in half and matching the corresponding gummy bear or jolly rancher with the other jolly rancher or gummy bear.  What was unique about the DNA structures replicating?  Both models were identical, which means when DNA replicates, it creates another DNA strand exactly like the original.





This is the original DNA structure.







This is (sloppy) what the duplicated DNA resembled.

 Odyssey
 What I think X represents in Aldo Leopold's Odyssey is nitrogen.  When it first talked about coming off of a rock, I was assuming that it has an element of some sort, I just didn't know which one.  The mystery became more transparent at the end of the first paragraph when Aldo stated when X was pulled up into the world of living things, it helps build a flower, then become an acorn, which, in turn, fattened a deer, and finally filled up an Indian, and it was then I was pretty positive the element was nitrogen because this process explains the biogeochemical cycle of nitrogen.  First off, the nitrogen cycle starts off with a plant taking nitrogen from the soil (the flower, which becomes an acorn).  Next in the nitrogen cycle, consumers get nitrogen from the food they eat (the deer eating the acorn, then the Indian eating the deer).  The one part of the nitrogen cycle not demonstrated in this example is the decomposition of a living thing releasing nitrogen back into the soil, but it is demonstrated later on the in chapter when Aldo states that for every atom that is lost in the sea (a living thing dying), the prairie pulls out another on the decaying rocks. 
What I think Y represents is the molecule H20, or better known as water.  This one was a little tougher to decipher than X, but once Aldo started talking about how erosion engineers built dams and terraces to hold it and army engineers constructed levees and wing-dams to flush it from rivers, that's what made me think that Aldo was referring to water molecules.  Then Odyssey talks about how they built a beaver pond and how Y landed in one of them.  The biogeochemical cycle this process explains is the water cycle.  This is described when it talks about where the water came from before it reached the pool how it made several trips through water plants, fish, and waterfowls, which, to me, made me think of runoff water from mountains and eventually landing in a lake, stream, river, or the ocean.  Although it doesn't really mention the process of evaporation, there is a mention of rain still pelting the fields and the only way for water to fall in the form of precipitation is if there is enough water for precipitation to occur.  Since there are so many different atoms and molecules in the human body, it is hard to dictate where each one has come from.  However, I am pretty positive I've obtained nitrogen when I ate spinach earlier today and consumed water when I was working out in the gym earlier today.  I think it is insane how and where all of these atoms and molecules come from, and how many are present in specific plant or animal.


Here is a representation of the nitrogen cycle.

Posted above is a representation of how the water cycle functions.

Thinking Like a Mountain
 From my interpretation, it seems to be about Aldo Leopold's first time killing a wolf.  He was sitting on a mountain with a friend of his and once they saw wolves coming at them, they fired upon the wolves with much excitement to the point where they lacked accuracy.  When it was all said and done, they mortally wounded the oldest wolf of the pack and Aldo and his friend realized the mistake they had made.  They were able to approach the wolf before it passed, and that was when Aldo saw a "green fire" in the wolf's eye, which represented the bond the wolf had with the mountain.  Once this little incident happened, Aldo become more conscious of the extirpation of wolves.  At the end, Aldo expresses how important it is to respect nature and its wildlife because Thoreau describes wildness as "the salvation of the world".  I found the first part really hard to read.  As a lover of animals, whenever I hear or read about people killing animals, it just doesn't settle very well with me and made me a little uncomfortable, and it made me sad when Aldo said he soon regretted his decision.  It kind of went along with my feelings in the sense that killing animals that isn't involved with safety precautions is tough to swallow.  I thought "thinking like a mountain" in terms of an ecological standpoint was spot-on in terms of how we view nature and animals.  We see a wolf kill a dog and the general public comes to the conclusion that wolves are killers, but they view dogs as a threat to their food chain, which makes the relationship between the dogs and wolves interspecific competition.  Because we view wolves this way doesn't mean they don't have a positive effect on our environment.  Wolves are prey to other animals and if there happens to be an absence in the wolf population, it impacts the animals that prey on wolves in a negative way.  Also, wolves keep other populations at a relatively steady rate, which makes our environment more sustainable in terms of carrying capacity.  If I were to think about the Marquette area, I would think similarly.  People get bent out of shape when the wolf population becomes large but over time, the population will decrease because of the intraspecific competition for common resources will eventually become low and the wolves will eventually die off.  I'm not really for the wolf hunt for the reason I listed above.  If the population of wolves becomes too large, it will eventually decrease because of competition between the other wolves.

Chain Factory
One day in class we decided to start a chain factory.  We were assigned specific roles, which were the generator, machine shop manager, keeper of the plans, messenger, warehouse worker, assembler, purchasing and shipping worker, custodian, and packaging workers.  Each worker had their own role, but couldn't function without EU.  For the robots to function properly or do tasks, they were required to get EU to follow through with the task.  For example, the messenger needed to use one EU for every set of instruction they gave, and would take one EU to the boss for each set of instructions.  At it's peak, the whole room was loud and people were moving all over the place, but at the same time it contained a lot of fun for everybody and demonstrated how effective a group of people can work when everybody collaborates.  After all of the pieces were made, it came to our attention that we weren't just acting like we were assembling metals, but it was the process of how making proteins work!  Although I was a custodian and didn't really comprehend the other functions very well, I felt I learned a lot more about the cell and its functions this way as opposed to lecture because we were actively engaged with everybody in the class.  Even though we did discuss how the functions compared to the functions of the cell, it was very helpful for us to do the activity first because it allowed us to obtain the mindset to help all of us think in the mindset of how a cell functions.


Here are two chains of Protein we made during our little group work construction.

Chernoff Faces
What I learned about the classification of living things after doing the Chernoff Face activity was how most classifications start off as broad overviews but as we get more specific, there are less and less species alike.  For example, we started off by splitting up into groups where we had the same head shape.  Although it was more specific, there were still quite of few people in each group.  However, after we broke it down further by the shape of our mouths, there were about three or four in each group.  Another kicker from the activity was how in which ways we were looking to classify and how that affected the outcome.  Instead of starting with the classification our head shape, we did the shapes of our noses--I think--and the people in each group changed drastically from the classifications of just our head shape.  This made me think about all of the species in our world, but the first that came to my head was the population of birds.  Scientists could first start off by classifying birds by the shape of their beak, whether it'd be rounded or pointed, and then classify further by the sound of their pitch and how there would be still thousands of birds classified in those two categories despite being fairly specific.  Birds are just a prime example about how scientists need to use all of their senses in classify birds because there are so many that are similar to each other, but they may have slight nuances which make them different.

Here are a couple of the faces in the experiment.  They are similar but very different at the same time.

Food Webs and Chains
One thing I learned about food webs is how overlapping they are with the other food chains, even with only a little over 20 organisms, including plants and dead stuff, present.  It seems in a roundabout way, all organisms end up eating each other throughout the cycle, whether they are a primary consumer, secondary consumer, or tertiary consumer because the primary consumers eat the plants, the secondary consumers may be just carnivorous and eat the primary consumer, but they are taking energy from the plant that the primary consumer ate as well, and it's the same process when it comes to tertiary consumers eating secondary consumers.  Something that could cause a food chain/web to collapse would be an epidemic in a certain species that wipes out a population of a living thing, like a white tailed deer.  Deer may not be highly consumed by other organisms, but they are a main source for some and if they were to die off, it might lead to starvation of the other organisms throughout the community.  One thing that blows my mind is that this was just a small food web with just a few of the organisms around Presque Isle, but the food web still overlapped and was messy to put together.  I couldn't imagine how messy it could have been if we were to include every organism existing in Presque Isle.

This was what our food web looked like when we were done piecing together what the 20+ organisms ate.