20 time individual reflection

20 time was a project that i was very interested in from the start. When my biology teacher, Mr. Orre first announced this assignment in class, my mind immediately began to wonder about all of the possibilities that this project offered. I was engrossed in all of the ideas that my mind came up with, and at the end, I settled with the car engine.

More than just a car engine, i wanted to delve into the ways that gas circulated in an engine, and my final product was going to be a presentation about how to maintain a car and how it works. I found out what i needed to research. I needed to understand how gas circulates, what different types of fuel injection existed, and how a car engine runs on gasoline. There were many more subtopics i needed to have extensive knowledge on, but that would take a lot of research and dedication to the project, something i wasn’t sure i could do.

A fellow classmate, Eveliina Niva, found interest in my project and wanted to join in, as she had not come up with her own idea yet. I saw a window of opportunity in this, knowing that i needed some extra help and also that i could give help to another classmate. I accepted her into my project, and over the weeks that we had time to research and gain knowledge for our presentation, i saw her hard work slowly adding up, as she researched many crucial articles towards the project that we now shared.

We decided that we wanted to make our presentation about helping others with their cars. A car is something that requires a lot of maintenance. It also requires safety to manage and drive properly. We wanted to make sure that by informing people of what their car needs and what it is capable of, we could save a driver some money, time, and keep them safe while and before they start driving.

Your Inner Fish

The movie “Your Inner Fish” featuring Neil Shubin gave many visual examples as to how humans evolved from fish.  Fish are aquatic creatures that swim in the ocean using fins, and breathe with a very complicated mechanism called gills. Shubin talked about a connection between these creatures and human beings. Its called Tiktaalik. Tiktaalik was the stepping fish between ancient aquatic life and humans. It could breathe in land and water, had a flexible neck, and could also… do a push up?

How is Shubin sure it can do a push up? Fossil records and fossils found by Shubin indicate that Tiktaalik had a skeletal structure capable of exiting the water, and also had strong wrists containing many digits, similar to our wrists. Their wrists were strong enough to support its own weight, and because of that it was technically able to do a push up.

Unit 9 Reflection

Unit 9 Reflection

Unit 9 was a unit on species and evolution. Species are classified by taxonomy, or large groups made of smaller groups. Larger groups include Kingdom, which covers many species, Phylum, which covers less, Class, Order, Family, then Genus which all classify a smaller group of species. Our class did a whole variety of presentations, linking them back to their taxonomical groups. Here’s mine about HIV.

One huge factor of evolution on Earth is environment. Species from the kingdom Plantae change constantly over time, and as a result have created different types of food and differing amounts and types of atmospheric gases that change what can live in these environments.

There are three domains this unit talked about. Plantae, Animalia, and Protista. Plantae include all the plants. This extends towards mosses, such as bryophytes. Mosses are nonvascular, so they don’t extend straight up, but they are the most common seedless nonvascular plants.

Animalia include invertebrates. These are animals without a backbone. They are separated into categories based upon their body plan symmetry, tissue layers, and developmental patterns. There are two different types of body plan symmetry, starting with bilateral symmetry where the body divides equally along one plane, and the radial symmetry, where the body is arranged in a circle around an axis. An example of bilateral symmetry would be a crab but a sea urchin would have radial symmetry.

There are also vertebrates, and they are classified into seven classes. Agnatha, chondrichthyes, osteichthyes, amphibia, aves, and mammalia. These are separated into “chronological” order, meaning that one appeared before the other. Agnatha is jawless fish, meaning they had little chewing or biting power, resulting in less potential for food gain than the osteichthyes, which were bony fish with jaws. These fish were able to capture more prey than the agnatha, but they came later.

Overall, this unit was a lot about improvement on current knowledge. It is common that we evolved from… something, but what was it? Where did it come from? What made it evolve? These were all questions that were answered in this unit. We seemingly evolved from a fish capable of doing a push up, according to Dr. Neil Shubin. It was able to breathe in and out of water, had a strong skeletal body, and had many digits in its wrists, allowing it to support a large amount of weight. We are able to know what came before us, and its characteristics.