Thursday, April 25, 2013

Your Inner Fish Chapter 10 Review

Essential Question: How do we hear?

There are 3 parts to the ear: the inner year, middle year and outer year.When a sound wave enters your ear first and then your cochlea vibrates. We can trace the developmental history of the structures of our ears all the way back to the gill arches in fish. The three ear bones are the malleus, incus, and stapes. 

The most interesting thing in this chapter is that our inner of the ear is descended from sharks.A neuromast organ is a tiny little system that sharks use to detect movement of the water around them.

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Your Inner fish Chapter 9 Review

Essential Question: History of vision. What is the history behind our eyes. 

    This chapter of Your Inner fish is all about vision. There is a little introduction to how our brain collects the information that we see. Most interesting fact that I found is that to you eyes the image you see is upside down. This is really interesting. My question is are we really seeing everything upside down? and we just don't know about it because everyone are seeing it the same way and we assume that our brain fixes it for us. While I was reading this chapter this is the only question that was in my brain

How the information gets to brain:

  • First the image passes through cornea: Which is a transparent located in front of your eye. 
  • Then it is passes through your iris. 
  • Then it goes through rods or cones
    • Rods are very sensitive, they only see black and white 
    • Cones take in color and they are less sensitive. 
  • Then it passes through the blind spot (spot where the optic nerve leaves to brain).
  • Then finally it reaches the brain.


Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Your Inner fish Chapter 8 Review

Essential Question: Function of smell. How it is helpful?

Shubin opens this chapter with an experiment and I find it interesting experiment. I really liked this quote: “DNA is an extraordinarily powerful window into life’s history and the formation of bodies and organs. ITs role is particularly important where the fossil record is silent. Large parts of bodies — soft tissues, for example — simply do not fossilize readily. In these cases, the DNA record is all we have.” This is the true fact and one of the interesting things this chapter.

Shubin was talking about how we can differentiate many different odor because of sense of smell. Well, our brain has stored different molecules and might associate with those memories when you smell something. Sense of smell is located near the part of the brain where memory is associated with.

  Shubin also talks about some  records of some major evolutionary transitions, such as the water-to-land move 365 million years ago. I think these are key factors of this chapter 

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Your Inner Fish Chapter 7 Review

    Essential question: Why are bodies there for us?

    Shubin deepens our learning about the history. This year, in biology we learned about the history of life and Cambrian explosion. We learned it through the 12 hour clock. Shubin discuses a little more about this history but instead of 12 hour clock he uses months and years. 

   Organisms are classified into different domains Everyone should know that organisms come in two basic sizes.  Single celled organisms in the Domains Eubacteria and Archeabacteria and multi-cellular organisms in the domain Eukarya. Shubin also talks about how we can use unicellular organism to study how we arrived. Not only that he talks something about Hydroxyapatite, which is strong when compressed, and Collagen, which is strong when ends are pushed together. 

This is kind of implied in the book but the main reason why multi-cellular organism can live is energy and the chemical processes that we can carry out. We can connect this to what we are learning currently in class today about cellular respiration. With our body being able to break down glucose and everything we able to do. We wont be able to live in this world. 
           

Your Inner Fish Chapter review 6

     Essential Question: From where did plans of body derive from?

All organisms have these features and the genetic systems that control the development of these features in even the most primitive animal do the same thing in our bodies. Humans are tetra-pods. Our bodies exist in three dimensions: the head on top, spinal cord toward our back,  and guts on belly side. During the first few days after conception, the single cell that will eventually form a fully adult human divides several times.  First into two cells, then four.  Eventually forming a small, hollow ball of cells called a blastocyst.  On the sixth day, the blastocyst embeds itself into the lining of the uterus.

 Shubin also talks about the three layers that I learned last year in of blastocyst. Every animals is "hollow tube with three layers of cells in the tube walls.  The hollow tube becomes the animal’s digestive system.  Mouth at one end, anus at the other, and some number and variety of tubes in the middle."

Things that I found really interesting in this chapter are as said in many biology classes blastocyst doesn't grow to be a person. Zygote actually builds up to a organism. Well when I researched, I changed my mind whether a fetus is living or non living. I always said it was living but now I think of it is not living because until it is a certain weeks nothing really is developed or nothing is formed they are just like bunch of cells that would be a human. If you think long term you are killing a baby but at only zygote point I say "we have cells that die in our body all time, so what is the point?"

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Your Inner Fish Chapter 5 Review

Essential Question: What is the structure of you head and connections to other animals?

      To summarize this chapter in one sentence it would be this chapter is all about structure of head and ancestry. I think he mentions about him studying about a skull before his anatomy exam. He then talks about the fundamental parts of our skull which are: Plates, rods and blocks. The plates cover our brain. The blocks holds up our brain. The rods make up our jaws, ears, and throats.

      When I was researching more about  four arches. I found out that humans and sharks have kind of the same embryonic development. Website mentions that "Human development is that we start from the same beginning as sharks.  The pieces of the embryo that form the head of humans and the head and gills of fish are in the same place, they are same shape, and there are four of them." I felt that was really interesting.

       

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Your Inner Fish Chapter 4 Summary

      In this chapter Shubin talks about teeth. He says that teeth of a fossil are really important to a paleontologist. Shubin describes some of his early days as a fossil hunter. I felt interesting how Shubin said that you look for something that is not a rock! I always had this question about how paleontologists find fossils? How do they know where to dig up? I just felt that was interesting.

    Shubin describes a group of primitive mammal-like animals called trithelodonts. Trithelodonts mean “three-knob teeth”. This was some of the earliest specialization in the shape of teeth. From my own research on why teeth are important and from what the book told me: Teeth are the original source of all hard parts of vertebrate animals.  Everything from specialized teeth, bones, and armor on some species all came from teeth. Teeth are the common ancestor of everything that comes from the skin.  We couldn't have hair or even mammary glands without the development of teeth 500 million years ago.