Big Questions 

Are we alone in the universe?
I chose this question because it's something I question quite often and something that really interests me. The universe is infinite and there are so many opportunities for life beyond Earth. About a year ago I watched a documentary called Cosmos and it really raised my interest in space science. They talked about how there are infinite planets in infinite galaxies in infinite universes. Something they said that really has stuck with me was "... and think about how each universe is like a water molecule in an endless waterfall." After hearing this I was quite open with the suggestion that life may exist beyond earth because I believe that all of that would not be there if there wasn't a purpose. The current hypothesis for this question is that in the next few decades we will potentially discover 60 billion habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
Some of my questions are...

1. Is there life beyond Earth? 
2. How much more oil do we have left?
3. Is it possible to explore beyond the Milky way?
4. Can we create a man made star?
5. Can we travel faster than the speed of light continuously for long periods of time?
6. Will the sun ever blow up?
7. Will there be another big bang?
8. How much is the maximum amount of people we can fit on this Earth?
9. Are we going to bury people on top of each other?
10. Are we going to have a limit of how many kids we can have?
11. Are there unknown species on Earth?
12. How did the first humans figure out how to reproduce?
13. Has there been multiple big bangs?
14. What is the sweetest substance?
15. Will we be able to survive as temperatures quickly increase?
16. What's the longest a person can run for?
17. When is Apple going to stop making iPhones?
18. Do fish sleep?
19. How long can a human go without sleep?
20. How many species are on the Earth?

Identifying Questions and Hypotheses

This study was found to show the average of time a person is on Facebook everyday. They found that the average amount a time a person spends on Facebook each day is between 36.79 minutes to 52.28 minutes.

Question: What is the average time spent on Facebook.

Hypothesis: The average time a user sends on Facebook is greater than 14 minutes a day.

In the world today people are so connected to social media that the result of this study was not unexpected. 

Facebook has many purposes which can increase the time a person spends on the app every day. Facebook is used for school too which is adding the amount of time on the app each day. 

http://mashable.com/2010/02/16/facebook-nielsen-stats/#bQ0xkB9oDOqc

Unit 2 Reflection 

In this unit we learned a lot about macromolecules like carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids, and proteins. Proteins are made of amino acids and nucleic acids store and transmit genetic information. Lipids are mostly made of carbon and hydrogen bonds. Carbohydrates are the main source of energy and plants and animals use it for structural purposes. We learned a lot about enzymes and also did a lab to help understand enzymes. I learned that the pH and temperature will affect enzymes and that with the right temperature It will work at a good constant speed. Some of my weaknesses in this unit were understanding the different between the structure and function of macromolecules. The sweetness lab was quite confusing and that is something that I need to look back at for more clarification. One thing that wasn't very confusing during that lab was explaining how sweet each sugar was and which sugars are the sweetest or the most plain. A success was understanding the structure of enzymes. I can thank the teacher for drawing the structure and explaining it several times during our do now. Another successful topic in this unit was the pH scale with acids and bases. It was a successful topic because it was mostly review. A cohesion is an atttraction between molecules of the same substance and adhesion is the attraction between molecules of different substances. A capillary action is cohesion+adhesion. A mixture is material composed of 2+ elements/compounds that are physically mixed together. A solute is a substance that is dissolved and a solvent is a substance that the substate dissolves in. A polar is an unequal distribution of charges between H and O. 

Cheese Lab

In this lab the problem was that the milk had to let the bacteria digest. When we let the milk curdle we are letting the bacteria digest. We found that with a hot temperature the rennin takes 10 minutes to curdle while chymosin only takes 5, At a controlled temperature they take the same time (15 minutes), and at a controlled pH chymosin takes 15 minutes while rennin only takes 10. My recommentation is to have the enzyme condition at acidic and use either rennin or chymosin because then it will only take 5 minutes to curdle.

Some mistakes that we made were that we took a long time in between pouring the rennin into the different tubes. We also put the last tube in between our armpit about a minute after we put the other tubes in the hot and the cold. In future experiments we can have multiple people pouring the rennin at the same time to quicken the process and put the rennin in the hot and cold water at the exact same time and also in between our armpit.

This lab was done to demonstrate how cheese is made and what the right temperature it takes for milk to curdle. The cold one didn’t curdle after 15 minutes, the warm one curdled after 15 minutes, and the hot one curdled after 10 minutes. I can relate this lab to our vodcast because in the vodcast we were told that pH and temperature effects enzymes and in this lab we saw how those factors affect how long it took for the milk to curdle. Based on my experience from this lab I have a pretty clear idea on how cheese is made and how long it takes to make the cheese.

Curdling Agent:	chymosin	rennin	buttermilk	milk (control)
Acid	5	5
Base
Cold
Hot	5	10
temp control	15	15
pH control	15	10
Average of controls

Sweetness lab

1.) In the sweetness lab my partner and I learned that based on our data monosaccharaides are the sweetest and polysaccharides are the most plain tasting. Monosaccharaides include glucose and fructose. I rated glucose a 150 and fructose a 200. I rated disaccharides all over the place. The first example was sucrose which is a disaccharide and they gave that a rating of 100. The other disaccharides were galactose, maltose, and lactose. I gave them a rating of 100, 0, and 50. Based on step 2 from our lab I can conclude that the sugars that are found in trees and plants are sweeter than the ones that aren't and also the ones that only have one O in their structure .

2.) The structure of carbohydrates affects the way they are used by cells/organisms because the different types of carbohydrates are used for different things. Disaccharides are used for transforming the suns energy into food. Monosaccharides are used during photosynthesis and polysaccharides are found in algae and are hard to digest.

3.) My partner and I mostly agreed on the ratings but the other partners in our group had a different opinion on some of the sugars. The first reason why people might not agree on the level of sweetness because people might have a different opinion on how sweet a sugar is. People might disagree that glucose is 200 instead of 150 but that is just based on someones opinion on how sweet at rating of 200 is. The second reason is that a person might have more or less taste buds that detect sweetness of the sugars. The final reason is that tasters might believe that 0 is bitter instead of tasting plain.

4.) Humans taste sweetness with taste receptor cells. The taste buds are scattered in all different places of our bodies. Taste buds have pores that they open out on the tongue. Sweet substances like sucrose bind together to form G-protein-coupled receptors (GPRCs) at the cell surface. Based on this information I conclude that humans can all rank the sweetness samples differently because they might have a different amount of taste bods on their tongue. More taste buds may taste sweeter for the taster and less taste buds may have a weaker taste of sweetness. 

sources: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Taste.html

Ava's biology collage