The Cambrian Explosion (Republish)

The Cambrian Explosion

Some 530 million years ago, many new and different types of marine animals came into existence in a relatively short period of time. These animals were the basic body types of many of our marine animals today. The classifications of them were mostly chordates, arthropods, nematodes, fungi, and plants. All of today's life on earth started out like this, and we have evolved greatly in those 530 million years. The most rapid period of growth, as explained before, was called the Cambrian Explosion. You might be thinking; "How did so much evolve? There wasn't much life to start with!" Well, without a small start, nothing becomes big, at least not as vast as all of the types of life that exist today! All animals and plants during the Cambrian grew and thrived underwater. Plants had not spread overwater and animals did not have the adaptations that we have, and were not able to live on land. You also might be asking why it was called the Cambrian Explosion, since it refers to a period of time instead of a singular event. Well, it was almost like an explosion, the evolution came out of nowhere and burst! Overall, the Cambrian Explosion changed the history of life on the planet we call home, and we would not be even close to as developed as we are if not for it.

Religious beliefs students have effect learning about evolution

Summary of "Students' religiosity more influential than education in views on evolution" by the University of Alabama. The University of Alabama wrote about the effect students' religious views have on their willingness to learn. It's not surprising that students in the south are more influenced by their religion than by science. Most research on evolution is done in the north and also the midwest; generally, teachers in the south refuse to teach their kids the theory. Studies show that students with weaker religious beliefs tend to be the only ones willing to look into it (University of Alabama, 2014).

It really does not surprise me at all that students at the University of Alabama, especially ones holding strong religious beliefs, refuse to accept something that has so much evidence and research for it. I honestly find it sad. People always say stuff like "Look how far our country's come!" But honestly, there's not much change that's changed at all. Social justice is something really interesting and important to me. I remember at the end of eighth grade, a speaker - Mr. Simpson (Ahmadu's father) - came to speak to us in history class. He gave a beautiful presentation on race and how sadly similar is now versus 100 years ago. His presentation really changed my life. Reading this article just really reminded me of how scared people are of change. I hope someday, for their own good, people will come to realize their privilege and take it in the right direction and accept science and not just their religion.

University of Alabama. (2014, October 7). Students' religiosity more influential than education in views on evolution. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 11, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141007131244.htm

Evolution of Rats

Summary of “How rats and mice came to have a unique masticatory apparatus, key to their evolutionary success” by Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)

          

         Do you hate rats? Have you ever just wished they would disappear? Well sadly for you, rats will probably never disappear. This is because rats and mice have been one of the most successful organisms in terms of evolutionary development.  There are over 583 different species of rodents throughout the world. These rodents live in all different environments.  Scientists still do not fully understand why these rodents have been so successful with evolution. A recent study shows that this might be due to their masticatory apparatus. A masticatory apparatus is pretty much the way there jaws and teeth are designed and aligned. The family that all rodents came from is known as Murinae, which appeared 12 million years ago in Asia. The researches found that there were two major evolutionary changes in the rat’s masticatory apparatus. The first change happened when they switched to an insectivorous diet, this new diet called for different chewing movements. Then the Murinae returned to a herbivorous diet, however they kept their chewing movements.  This chewing movement helped them evolve and overcome many obstacles.

            I find it extremely fascinating how animals can evolve and change entire aspects of their lifestyle. This article really shows how much the rats that we often consider “nasty” have evolved and thrived with evolution. It is hard to believe that something as simple as changing you diet could change your evolutionary success in such a huge way.

APA citation

Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). (2013, October 28). How rats     and mice came to have a unique masticatory apparatus, key to their evolutionary success. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 9, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028100942.htm

Evolution Of Sleep

Summary of "The Evolution of Sleep: 700 Million Years of Melatonin"

Carl Zimmer wrote this article about the evolution of sleep. He says that we may think we have some control of when we go to sleep but we do not. When they day becomes dark and the sun is gone your brain has a chain reaction that ends up releasing melatonin into your brain. This then latches onto your neurons pushing the brain into sleep. Then when the sun comes out it gets the melatonin out. We try and fight these by doing something that we thinks keeps us awake but it never works. When we travel into a different time zone we think we can just change our clocks but the melatonin drags behind making us want to fall asleep at our normal time. Melatonin actually evolved over 700 million years ago. Scientists believe that we got melatonin from are oceangoing ancestors.  Melatonin is more important than we think and it starts a huge chain reaction says Carl Zimmer (New York Times, 2014).

I found this article extremely interesting. What I found especially interesting was whenever I go to Ireland every summer which is the opposite time zone is that we can never get adjusted too the the time change. I always thought it was just because we lived somewhere and we always went to bed at the same time. I never knew that it was due to to the fact of this. I find this extremely interesting and I want to learn more about it. If I was to interview the man who wrote this I would ask him what does sleeping pills do to you. Do they harm you or are they okay to take? Also is there a way to change it so humans become nocturnal? This seems like an intriguing paper and I would love to learn more about it.

APA Citation 

Zimmer, C. (2014, October 2). The Evolution of Sleep: 700 Million Years of 

     Melatonin. New York Times. 

Ballons That Create Power

Summary of "The Quest To Harness Wind Energy At 2,000 Feet" by Erik Sofge

          At Greentown labs in Summerville, Massachusetts, a group of engineers and environmental scientists have created Buoyant Airborne Turbine, or ABT, capable of flying at 2,000 feet to create power. Climate scientist, Ken Caldeira, estimates that the balloon could create up to four times more power than a similar turbine would on the ground. Another plus to the ABT is that its mobile and can be put up in a day with a small crew, much faster than it would take a large crew to put a similar turbine. So who would use this? Areas around the world without access to the electrical grid where other forms of renewable resources are to expensive would be able to utilize the ABT because of its relatively low price. 

          I really enjoyed this article because I have never heard of this technology before and learned more about renewable energy. I think that renewable energy is becoming very important, and emerging technologies like these are the future of renewable energy. I would really like to know how the creators of the ABT came up with the idea because of how abstract it is. This article really shows people what our future energy sources could be, and   shows that even the craziest ideas can be a reality. 

Sofge, E. (2014, October 6). The quest to harness wind energy at 2,000 feet. Popular Science.

Molecular Evolution

Hello Everyone!
Check out this really cool article on ScienceDaily about a chemistry professor who studied an enzyme called dihydrofolate reductase throughout different evolutionary states.


APA Citation:
University of Iowa. (2013, December 13). Evolution on molecular level.ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 5, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131213201032.htm

Evolution Article and Reflection

Blobfish?

                 

                 The blobfish is a facinating creature and one that I always have a lot of questions about. What is even more perplexing about them is that everyone has many unanswered questions about the blobfish , making room for questions and hypotheses. 

                 I didn't pick an article really, but I picked a cool presentation about the evolution of blobfish, and I went back to verify with other sources to make sure this one was credible. (it is) The blobfish is a sea creature that evolved from a larger sized fish that used to live closer to shore than they do now. The fish is now only about 30 cm long at average and live between 2,000 and 4,000 feet deep in the ocean. They came to be this way because over time, the family "realized" that they had to compete too much for food closer to the surface, so they gradually made their way down deeper and deeper until now, where they have virtually no competition for food. Because where they live has so much pressure due to how deep they are, they replaced their average fish skin and replaced it with a kind of gelatin. They also got rid of their gas filled swim bladder, for they would burst under the pressure and became a gelatinous blob. The pressure now cannot bother their innards or skin. They have easy access to food AND because of their gel bodies, they don't even have to swim because they just go where the ocean takes them as they suck up anything edible along the way. This works because their gel bodies have a perfect buoyancy level that allows them to float just below the ocean floor without having to use a speck of energy to swim. This results in them barely having any muscles at all. This also means that if they are taken out from the water, they will loose any form of shape, shrivel up, and die. 

               Overall, the blobfish is a remarkable creature, not only because of its' uniqueness, but because of all the questions left to answer such as how they reproduce or how their eggs are fertilized or IF their eggs even need to be fertilized or if they have genders or sexual organs or how they behave. I am so glad I read about this animal because I has so many of my questions answered, but I still get to hypothesize the unanswered questions. 

Work Cited:
The Blobfish. (n.d.). Retrieved from Prezi website: http://prezi.com/ddeb0r_zlpga/the-evolution-of-the-blobfish/

Picture Source:
http://www.fishwallpapers.com/wallpapers/blobfish-pic.jpg

Evolution of Fairness

The article I read discussed how our sense of fairness evolved to encourage cooperation between humans, however, scientists wanted to test to see if animals felt fairness as well. They thought that animals such as monkeys would have some sense of fairness because monkeys work together a lot, unlike other species such as polar bears who do not interact with one another except to mate. To test this, scientists conducted an experiment consisting of two monkeys who each had to give a rock to the scientist in exchange for a cucumber. When both monkeys received cucumbers, they were perfectly happy, however, in the next experiment with the same monkeys, one of the monkeys received a grape as a reward, a far better reward than the cucumber that the other monkey received. The monkey that received the cucumber noticed his partner was getting a grape and he was not thrilled. After two or three time occurrences he became frustrated and hurled his cucumber at the scientist. This was a clear sign that the monkey felt that it was unfair that he was getting a worse prize for the same task. Dr. Sarah Brosnan, the scientist conducting the experiment, says that fairness only appears in animals that routinely intreract with others that are not related to them. However, she says that it is one thing to notice when you receive less than someone, like the monkeys, but only one species, the great apes, seem to notice when they get more than the other. Also, she says that the second step of fairness is if you do notice you received more than your partner, you are willing to share because your partner is a valuable to you.

I found it really interesting how scientists are discovering the intelligence and human like qualities such as creativity and individualality in animals and now finding that some animals also have a sense of fairness. I thought it was funny seeing the monkey in the cucumber-grape experment throwing the cucumber at the scientist in frustration. This article has helped me become more aware of the feeling of fairness and why other species may not share this sense. Seeing this experiment made me curious about what other human like traits animals may naturally posses, and why.

Source:

Salleh, A. (2014). Fairness evolved to support co-opperation. Retrieved October 

     12, 2014, from ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/09/19/4089349.htm 

Brain Evolution

When I stumbled upon this explaining new discoveries about the evolution of the human brain, I was intrigued. The article says that gnomic data is helping to understand the brain, much more so than ever before. Because of the recent increase in how much data there is, they can now compare humans to other species. Daniel Geschwind, professor of human genetics at the University of California, says that they are currently testing "hypotheses based on comparative genomics in experimental systems." Lately there have been more and more findings of important changes in human genomes. If they continue this important research, we may have a new key factor in discovering how humans evolve over time.

Kavli Foundation. (2014, July 9). Will genomics soon explain the human brain gain?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 5, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140709095342.htm

Scorpion Venom Evolution

A new theory in biology suggested an connection to the deadly venoms found in scorpions and the defensins, small proteins that ward of viruses and bacteria, in insects have a common ancestry. After studies were conducted, scientists discovered that a simple evolutionary genetic deletion event could change these defensins into deadly toxins.

Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press). (2014, January 14). How scorpion gets its sting. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 3, 2014 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140114202909.htm