"You can go to great lengths with this guy's helix."

                                         -Man who brings Vincent and Jerome together, GATTICA

        Vincent was not born out of wedlock, so he was put at a distinct disadvantage. Once the real Jerome decides to give Vincent his life after the loses the use of his legs, Vincent gains a slight advantage; he essentially becomes Jerome and has a chance to achieve his dream. Otherwise, Vincent never would have gone into space. This quote says that, in a helix biased world, an engineered helix goes farther than a natural one, which implies that the unnatural is better than luck.

Bees: What Will It Take for People to Get Up and Help Them

Bees do so much for us; everything from giving us honey to pollinating 60% of the foods we eat. We literally can not survive without bees. However, we have been forgetting this; we have started to reduce the bee population to a point where whole colonies have started to just disappear. But the sad thing is, no one is noticing.

So what will it take for us to realize that we need to save the bees?

Besides starving, I think the best solution is to start a movement. Inform people on the problem and the severe consequences of things such as pesticides and seasonal pollinating on bee colonies. Make people think differently about bees, and encourage them to start a colony of their own.

We could even recruit some of the people who have already started helping bees, such as the people who have started bee sanctuaries.

So, I think if we educated everyone now, we can definitely help save the bees

Collard, I am your father.. and mother

Our beautiful Collard

The Collard and its surrounding friends have grown from a seed to full grown, diverse organisms. Since all of these plants are descended from the brassica oleracea, I have to ask: How are there so many different species of the same organism?

Just from looking at our Collard, I can tell that its parents probably looked somewhat like their offspring. Even so, the creation of the cell that started it all (the zygote) is random; there is no way to know definitively from whom our collard got its genes and how the genes were mixed and combined in the mother and father's gametes. 

If our collard makes offspring, we can assume that it will look somewhat like our collard, mixed with the other organism. However, which traits it inherits is actually very random. When a gamete is made, there are two ways the chromosomes can be made unique. The first is crossing over. This is where two chromosomes trade an end of each other's chromosomes:

crossing over

The other way is called independent assortment, where, when the genes are being copied, instead of copying the chromosome gene for gene, the chromosomes are mixed so that the paternal (from the father) and maternal (from the mother) genes are not distinguishable:

However, if we wanted the baby collard to have a certain trait, then we could find the likeliness of it by using punnett squares:

Some are really simple ^

Others.. not so much.

Our collard started as a seed, but how was that seed made? Well, our collard's parents made it by the combining of their two gametes. What are gametes? They are cells which are made by meiosis, a process in which a cell devoted to reproduction splits into 4 unique daughter cells made to combine with a gamete of the other gender to make a zygote, or in our case, a seed. In plant terms, the stamen (or paternal plant structure) combines with a pistil (or female paternal plant structure), which, incidentally, are both contained in each plant.

In return, our collard will pass its traits on to its offspring. However, it is not guaranteed that all of its (or its grandparents') traits will show; it might pass on its recessive alleles, so the phenotype probably won't show our collard's trait, but rather the other brassica oleracea's. It also might pass on some dominant alleles, in which case the phenotype will be like our collard.

A wild collard

Collard comes in many different species, but if you trace back to the ancestors of these species, you would come back to the same plant. This is because evolution has morphed these species into the best possible, so that they have the best possible chance of surviving and passing on their traits.

Meiosis: with paper plates and pipe cleaners

Claire's Seed Story

When Claire first started this project, she hated gardening. However, her views changed once she found out how fun it actually was. Seeing the plants grow overtime, and knowing why made her look at gardening in a new light. Of course, her friends (aka Ariana and I) also helped with this. When we were taking pictures of our full-grown plants just a week ago, we had a great time. We were talking about how much we all sucked at gardening. We took pictures of our plants, but we ended up taking selfies so much that the people in the classrooms started looking at us. All in all Claire's experiences with this project has changed her ideas on gardening.

For the Love of Collard

The collard that started out as a small seed..

...has now grown into a full grown collard!

These Collards have grown so much over these 3 months. From seed to full-grown organism, this plant has grown a lot of biomass, but how? It couldn't have just been created. 

 The seed starts out as a small collection of cells (stem cells) and they duplicate and duplicate again and again and they keep on doing this until there are thousands upon thousands of different cells which do different jobs for the collard.  How do these cells duplicate? Well, through a process known as mitosis, the cell divides in an extremely intricate process which happens in a matter of seconds. Basically, all of the DNA in the nucleus (thats 6 whole feet end to end) is systematically unwound, split up, and copied by an enzyme called DNA polymerase. Then the nucleus splits up, one half of the chromosomes in one half and the other in the other half. Then the rest of the cell splits up and, voilà, you have two daughter cells.

With that question answered, one more springs to mind; where does the cell get the energy to do mitosis hundreds of times every second?

Well, when a cell is not dividing, it goes into a phase called interphase, which is not a stage in in mitosis, but rather a stage where the cell builds up the energy to divide again. The process in which the cell makes energy in plants is called photosynthesis, which takes place in the chloroplast of a plant cell. The way cells store energy is by turning ADP (Adenosine Diphosphate) into ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). They do this by consuming light, water and carbon dioxide and spitting out oxygen, which the plant breathes out, and sugars, which the cell uses and converts to ATP.  (The way animals produce energy is almost identical, except they consume oxygen and sugars, and give off carbon dioxide, ATP, which it uses, and water, which it also uses).  

Another interesting point is that the mechanisms which make photosynthesis are enzymes (Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase [PEPC] and ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase [Rubisco]), which are proteins, which are made of amino acids, which are made by ribosomes, which use RNA for directions, which are all duplicates of our friend, DNA.

So we just went around a big circle of... collard?

Watching grass grow doesn't seem so boring now, does it?

Food Issue essay : Do people have a right to know what is in their food ?

Diana Laura Pimentel
Nov 20 , 2012
Period 2

                                    Do people have a right to know what’s in their food ?

The people have to know what they’re eating but some people don’t worry about the type of
food , they only care about the price they are not forced to buy any particular food in us but in
us they love the fast food and they don’t care if the food are unhealthy or have many calories  
because sometimes they don’t have time so they go for fast food .

In the other hand some people don’t like to eat fast food and they worry about what kind of food they’re eating because the food comes from a bad place or farms and because the food have many calories and others people like to eat in their houses because they eat healthy food or they eat organic food , they’re doing right because they are taking care of their body and the world 
.
People have a right to know what’s in their food because is more healthy safe and better to the environment and they’re taking care of their body and health i wish all the people thinks like that because is better to everyone .