20 time reflection

For my 20 time project, Sophie and I came up with our idea because of our shared interest in hiking. We decided we wanted to make a blog where we could share information about hiking trails. We wanted to give people a place to go to find new trails and get information about them like intensity, how to get there, distance and other important things.  We created the blog and started posting reflections on trails weekly.  We also had a goal to monitor the amount of trash on the trails we chose so that at the end we could organize a group of our friends and students to go clean up a trail. We planned on doing the clean up on may 6th, but because of weather we had to reschedule it to later this week.  We challenged ourselves because we had to set a lot of time aside so that we could go on all these different trails.  We learned a lot, we didn't know how many different trails there were in this area but we got to visit and see a lot. We found a lot of different animals and interesting things. We did research and learned about all of the health benefits of hiking.  If I were to do this project again but differently maybe I would chose some more difficult trails or travel further to see some of the more popular trails.

Reflexes Lab

In this lab we tested our reflexes by doing a series of tests. For the first test to test our photopupillalry reflex, we covered one of our eyes and shined a flashlight over the hand, so when we removed the hand we watched the pupil to see it change in size.  The autonomic reflex is responsible for regulating the changes in pupil size.  We learned that when the intensity of light entering the eye increases, the photopupillary reflex is triggered and it stimulates the cilliary body to contract. Next, we hit our knee to see if it would kick out to test our monosynaptic reflex. When you hit below the knee, it causes the thigh muscle to stretch.  The knee jerk reflex has two neuron reflex arcs, it goes from sensory neuron to spinal cord to motor neuron to the knee.  For the next reflex, we tested the blink reflex by having someone stand with a piece of saran wrap in front of their face and have another person throw a cotton ball at it and observe if the person blinks.  The blink reflex is important because it protects the eye from things that could damage it.  To test our plantar reflex, we dragged a pen up the sole of the foot from heel to the base of the big toe, and observed if the toes moved closer together or further apart, and for us they moved closer together which is normal.  The toes might move further away if there is nerve damage, this could be a sign that the nervous system isn't completely myelinated. By dropping a ruler, having someone catch it and recording the number of inches the ruler dropped we could calculate the amount of time it took for us to activate our visual and motor reflexes.  We did the trial 3 times and took an average, then tried it again but while the ruler was being dropped you had to write a text with one hand and catch the ruler with the other hand.  By adding in that we had to type out a text, it slowed down our reaction time and made it harder for us to respond and catch the ruler.

Eye when first exposed to the light

eye after exposed to light
 pupil got smaller

Brain Map

The frontal lobes control your personality, helps with problem solving, memory, language and judgement.  The frontal lobes also controls your critical thinking and problem solving skills.  The last part of your brain to develop is the frontal lobes and to prevent it from deteriorating you can do exercises, but it still deteriorates with age.  The neo cortex helps navigate your body, it controls your awareness, senses, and motor skills. The pre frontal cortex controls your personality also, and how you behave in social settings. There is a part of the pre frontal cortex that tries to prevent you from doing two things at the same time.  The broca's area is responsible for speech production and language comprehension, tongue twisters may help improve part of your brain.  The sensory cortex is the part of your brain that is responsible for interpreting information from your senses. Your visual cortex helps you differentiate colors and recognize faces.  Parts of your occipital lobe sense motion and process visual information.  The occipital lobe helps you process short and long term memories. If your temporal lobes were damaged, you would have trouble remembering things because this is where your brain stores memories. Your fast brain picks up information in milliseconds. A neurotransmitter that is important to me is glycine, because it is used by neurons in the spinal cord which is really important.  The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Listening to music can strengthen your corpus callosum.  The thalamus has nerve networks that send signals to the brain.
Relate and Review: 
In this brain map stimulation, I got to see the different parts of the brain and their functions. I also got to read more interesting facts about the different parts and figure out what would happen if these different parts were damaged. In the stimulation I got to read about the frontal lobes, neo cortex, occipital lobe, frontal cortex, the sensory cortex, and much more.  It helped me more understand how people are different, like how the pre frontal cortex controls your personality and how you behave in social settings showed me how some one with a different pre frontal cortex could be completely different. Also how the man who damaged his frontal lobes how his friends said he was a totally different person after the injury shows how important your brain is.

Sheep Brain Dissection

This shows the anterior side of the brain (white),
posterior side(black), the cerebellum(green), the
cerebrum(yellow), and the brain stem(red).

Sketch of the brain cut in half

In this lab, we dissected a sheep brain to identify important brain structures and their functions. First we got the brain and looked at the meninges, or the 3 layer tissue that protects the brain and spinal cord.  Next we removed the meninges and labeled the anterior side of the brain with a white pin, the posterior side with a black pin, the cerebellum with a green pin, the cerebrum with a yellow pin, and the brain stem with a red pin. Then we took pictures and sketched it.  Now, we cut the brain in half so we could see the grey and white matter.  Next we identified some more parts and labeled them with markers.  We marked the thalamus with a yellow pin, the optic nerve with a green pin, the medulla oblongata with a silver pin, the pons with a white pin, the midbrain with a blue pin, the corpus colassum with a red pin, and the hypothalamus with a black pin then took pictures and sketched it. We then identified the function of these structures and then cut a cross section in the cerebrum to see more grey and white matter and then sketched it.

sketch of the brain untouched

white and grey matter

Sheep Eye Dissection

This is the eye when we first got it,
 it is covered in a lot of
fatty tissue

The yellow ball shaped thing in the
picture is the lens, and it is
surrounded in the vitreous humor.

In this dissection, we took a sheep eye and cut it up to locate and learn about the different parts of the eye.  When we first got the eye, we  noticed it was very squished and oddly shaped, also there was a lot of fatty tissue.  First we found the cornea, which functions like a window that controls light entry. Next we found the sclera, optic nerve, external eye muscle and fatty tissue.  The sclera protects the eye and connects to the muscle that moves the eye. The optic nerve transfers information from the retina to the vision centers of the brain.  The external eye muscles move the eye, and the fatty tissue protects the eye and holds it in place. After finding these, we found the vitreous humor, retina, blind spot, choroid, and the peel layers of the retina and choroid. The vitreous humor is a jelly like substance behind the lens and it helps the eye maintain its shape. The retina is a think layer of tissue in the back of the eye on the inside, it receives light and converts it to signals to send to the brain.  The blind spot is a small section of the visual field that you can't see, there are no photoreceptors in this part. The choroid is between the sclera and the retina, it provides nourishment for the back of the eye. After this we found the ciliary body, lens, suspensory ligaments, iris pupil and the aqueous humor. The ciliary body connects the iris to the choroid, it releases a clear liquid called the aqueous humor, which maintains pressure in the eye.  The lens changes shape to help the eye focus on things from different distances. Suspensory ligaments help the lens curve to increase or decrease the refraction of light. The iris is the colored part of the eye which helps light levels inside the eye and the opening in the middle of the iris is the pupil, which also controls how much light gets to the back of the eye.

we cut the cornea off, and you
can see the pupil opening, on the side
you can see the bright colored tissue on
the side or the tapetum lucidum. 

"The Woman with a hole in her brain"

In this article it talks about a woman who was unaware of the fact that she is missing her cerebellum until she was 24.  She went to the hospital because she was nauseous and dizzy and they did a CAT scan and it showed that where her cerebellum should be it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid. She had trouble walking most of her life and she also wasn't able to speak that well until she was 7.  The cerebellum is 10% of the brains volume but 50% of the brains neurons. The cerebellum's function is it controls your voluntary movements and balance.
The Parietal Lobe
The parietal lobe controls sensations, it deals with and reacts to environment and it processes sensory information.  If your parietal lobe is damaged, the person will have trouble reading, recognizing things and people. It will be harder for them to be aware of their bodies.  People with damaged parietal lobes have trouble multitasking, issues with telling right and left apart and the mathematic skills they have is often reduced.  You can't live without the parietal lobe.

The Clay Brain

We studied the brain and made a model of the left hemisphere along the sagittal plane and the right cerebral hemisphere using clay on cardboard.  We traced an outline of the brain with pencil and filled in the spots with different colored clay, then labeled the parts in a key.

Unit 7 Reflection

In this unit, we learned about the muscular system.  There are a lot of different joints and defining characteristics for them.  For example, there are levers, which is a rigid object that rotates around a fixed point called a fulcrum.  Rotation occurs when effort overcomes resistance.  There are first class levers, second class levers and third class levers. Joints are the point of a connection between two bones or elements of a skeleton especially if it allows motion.  Ligaments are bone to bone, and tendons are bone to muscle.  The functional classification of joints are synarthroses, or immovable joints, amphiarthroses, or slightly movable joints, and diarthroses, or freely movable joints. There are fibrous joints which are generally immovable, cartilaginous joints, which are immovable or slightly movable, and synovial joints which are freely movable.  There are 17 different directional terms and joint movements that we learned about. For example, flexion is the movement that decreases the angle between two bones and extension is the movement that increases the angle between two bones. Muscles are very important in our bodies because they do a lot of things, like the movement of bones, maintaining posture and body position, stabilizing joints, and heat generation.  There are a few properties of muscle tissue, excitability, or the ability to receive and respond to stimuli, contractility, or the ability to shorten when stimulated, extensibility, or the ability to be stretched, and elasticity, or the ability to recoil to resting length.  Connective tissues components are fascia (thin sheets of fibrous connective tissue that holds muscle fibers together), epimysium (fascia that surrounds the entire muscle), perimysium (separates muscles into bundles), endomysium (fascia that surrounds each muscle fiber), and tendon (a cord of dense regular connective tissue composed of collagen that attaches muscle to periosteum to bone).  Origin is the immovable end of the muscle and insertion is the movable end of the muscle, when a muscle contracts the insertion is moved towards the origin.  We learned about skeletal muscle, and that its composed of thousands of bundles of muscle fibers.  We did a chicken dissection, where we located all of the main muscles and labeled them. We wrote reflections on our blogs. My Chicken Dissection Reflection.  Mr. Orre taught us about the three different types of muscle fibers.  There slow twitch fibers which are slow oxidative, fast twitch fibers which are fast oxidative, and fast twitch fibers which are fast glycolytic.  The general effects of exercise on muscles is it helps to increase metabolism, strengthens bones, increases muscular endurance, helps prevent injuries, and it increases coordination and balance.  Hypertrophy is when cells increase in volume due to move myofibrils, and hyperplasia is when cells remain the same in size, but they increase in number.  We made a stop motion video to show how muscle contractions work. Our Muscle Contraction Video To keep our muscles healthy it is important to exercise regularly, eat healthy, don't smoke, know basic first aid, and you should train aerobically and anaerobically. We also were taught about performance enhancement substances and how it effects our bodies.  This unit, we learned a lot about the muscular system, and it helped me understand it a lot more.

Picture from our chicken dissection

Human Growth Hormone

Performance enhancing substances are a manufactured product for oral insertion, intranasal application or inhalation containing components that contain a stimulant, amino acid, hormone, precursor, etc.  Human growth hormone is a hormone that has a anabolic effect and improves muscle mass and performance.  There are  a few consequences, like joint pain, muscle weakness, and carpal tunnel syndrome.

Chicken Disection Analysis

In this Lab we dissected a chicken and we will be locating the main muscles.  We began by removing the skin from the chest.  We found the pectoralis major and the pectoralis minor which is right under it.  Next we removed the skin on its back and found the trapezius and latissimus dorsi.  Next we Removed the skin on the chickens wings and found the deltoid, biceps brachii and the triceps humeralis. We also found the flexor carpi ulnaris and the brachiordialis.  Next we removed the skin on the chickens thigh and found the sartorius, iliotibialis, semimembranosus, semitendinous, quadriceps, and the gastrocnemius.  We also found the preens longs and the tibias anterior.  The pectoralis major helps pull the wing ventrally and the pectoralis minor lifts the wing dorsally.  The trapezius helps shrug the shoulders and the latissimus dorsi extends or pulls the wing.  The deltoid helps raise the upper wing, the biceps brachii helps bend the wing, and the triceps humeralis extends the wing.  The flexor carpi unlearns flexes the hand, and the brachiordialis helps pull the hand back. The sartorius flexes the thigh, the iliotibialis extends the thigh, the biceps femurs flexes the leg and the semimembranosus extends the thigh also.  Semitendinosis extends the thigh, quadriceps femurs extends the lower left, and the gastrocnemius is used for standing on your toes.  The preens longs extends the foot and the tibias anterior flexes the foot.  The biceps brachii is an example of an origin, and origins are the attachment site of the muscles tendon to a stationary bone.  Insertion is the attachment site of a tendon to a moveable bone. There are a lot of muscles in the chicken that are pretty similar to the muscles we have.  For example the deltoid what is on the center top of the shoulder of the chicken and of humans which helps to raise your upper arm or in chickens their wing.   The trapezius is muscles that run perpendicular from the backbone to the shoulder of the bird and pull the shoulder back, but in humans they're split into two parts.  The triceps humeralis is the muscle on the inferior side of the upper wing or arm in birds and humans, and it extends the arm or in chickens the wing.

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Unit 6 Reflection

Owl Pellet lab

Skeleton 

This unit was about the skeletal system. We learned about the different bones, their functions, bone disorders, and what they're made of. The bones support the body, protects our soft organs, stores minerals, blood cell formation, and when attached to skeletal muscles, movement. We also learned that there are two types of bone tissue, compact bone and spongy bone.  Compact bone is homogenous and spongy bone is small needle like pieces of bone, and has many open spaces. Mr. Orre taught us that Ca and P are the minerals that make bones hard, and collagen makes them strong and allows flexibility. Osteoblasts and osteoclasts are apart of a process called bone remodeling. Osteoclasts destroy bone cells, they break down bone for remodeling and calcium release, osteoblasts are bone forming cells. Bones are classified by their shape, there are long bones, short bones, flat bones and irregular bones. Some of the bone disorders we learned about were osteoporosis (porous bones), scoliosis (curvature of spine), Kyphosis (Curvature of thoracic spine), lordosis (curvature of lumbar spine), and rickets (softening or weakening of bones).  Ossification is the process by which bone forms, and it begins 6-7 months before birth and continues until your about 25 years old. In the future I would like to learn more about treatments to bone disorders.

Bone slide

Owl Pellet Lab

humerus

We did an Owl Pellet lab, where we dissected owl pellets and tried to figure out what type of animal the owl ate.  We had to look at the bones we found and try to match them to other animal bones. Our owl pellet was 5.69 grams, 9 cm long and 2 cm wide.  In it we found two skulls and a lot of very small bones. The skulls were 3.5 cm long, 2.5 cm wide and the lower jaw was 2.5 cm long and 1 cm wide. Looking at the charts and information we were given, we decided that it was a vole.  The first thing we saw was the humerus, the bone has a part that pokes out and it matched the picture we had of a vole's humerus. Then the skull has a curve right after the front of the mouth and then in the back there were teeth and the vole was the only animal that has a skull with this shape. Also the lower jaw we found has the same shape as a vole.  The ribs that we found in our owl pellet are very similar to ribs on a human, they are the same shape. The back bones we found were similar to human back bones because they lined up like human spines do.  We found a bone which we thought was the femur and it was pretty similar to the human femur, it was the same shape and had the ball in socket joint. Some things we found different was the humerus, the bone poked out at a point and the human bone doesn't do that. Also the tibia and fibula were reversed, in the human skeleton the tibia is bigger than the fibula but in the vole, the fibula is bigger than the tibia and they were also connected. Another difference we found was in the skull, it has very big eye sockets and the mouth is a lot different. Overall we learned a lot about the differences in these bones and human bones, and also it was interesting to see what owls eat and to take apart the owl pellets.

tibia and fibula 

  

skull and mandible

Unit 5 Reflection

Fed State Poster

In this unit we learned about the digestive system, metabolism, diabetes, endocrine system and the lymphatic system.  We learned that there are six basic functions of digestion, ingestion, secretion, mixing/propulsion, digesting, absorption, defecation. The digestive system has many accessory organs and we found out the pathway that food takes. ATP is the universal carrier for metabolism and it can be generated by the oxidation of glucose, fatty acids and amino acids. It takes three stages for energy to be extracted from food. We learned more about diabetes and what causes it.  Diabetes is when your body cant properly control blood glucose levels and you body cant make enough insulin, and it cant respond to it. Type 1 diabetes is when the body doesn't produce insulin at all and they must take insulin by injecting it. Type 2 diabetes begins with insulin resistance and is more common then type 1 diabetes.  The endocrine system controls the processes involved in movement and physiological equilibrium.  We learned about the organs in the endocrine system and their hormones. We were taught about the lymphatic system and how it is involved in immunity, lipid absorption and fluid recovery.  Lymph is a clear colorless fluid that flows throughout lymphatic vessels.  The main organs of the lymphatic system are Lymph nodes, thymus, tonsils and spleen. In this unit we did a lab where we measured out our digestive tracts with strings, and we found out that it is a lot longer then we thought it was.

strings across the top are digestive tracts

The Digestion System Lab

In this lab we measured out the length of each part of the digestive system and at the end we added up all of the lengths and got the length of our digestive tracts. The main takeaways I got from this activity is that the intestines are a lot longer than I imagined.  With all of the digestive lengths put together it was very long.  For our small intestine we multiplied our height times 4, which is pretty long so for it to be able to fit in our abdomen it needs to be very bunched up and folded.  The small intestine is very long but it is not as wide as the large intestine.  The large intestine is much wider than the small intestine but it is shorter, for this your large intestine was about your height so we used out height and measured out the yarn.  My guess to how long it takes for food to move through your entire digestive system would be about 8 hours.  I looked it up and it says it takes between 24-72 hours for food to move through the entire system.  My guess was very off, but a big factor to how long it takes is the type of food it is.  Digestion is different from absorption because digestion is breaking down food into smaller pieces and absorption is taking the needed nutrients. Your intestines are where absorption takes place and digestion involves the mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, liver, gall bladder, pancreas, anal cavity and the anus.  I don't have any questions about digestion, I want to learn more about how different people can't digest foods, but others can like for example celiac disease.

New Years Goals

My first goal for the new year is I need to start putting more time aside to study.  I need to be more on track with when my tests and quizzes are and plan ahead to make sure that I have enough time to go over everything and have time to study well. I also need to study more thoroughly for all of my classes. My second goal is I need to get more sleep.  For me to get more sleep I need to go to bed earlier, which means I have to get my homework done earlier so I am not up late trying to finish it.  I usually procrastinate when I get home from school, but I want to start getting my homework done quicker so I have more time so I can go to bed earlier.  It will also help me be more awake during school.