The Amazing, Conceptual, Concept Map of Science!

Well, after an entire period of wrangling with different web hosts, this image file is finally ready!

I thought I'd just throw together this little concept map to show just how my mind works. Hope you enjoy it!

The Prestigious College of Collagen

First off, an apology: This blog has, over the last week, fallen into complete, utter, total neglect. We here at the Department of Michael 'R' Us will try and prevent this from happening again, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We will be willing to provide free tickets to two future blogs in the future.

(Sorry!) 

Now, some musings on the protein of the month: collagen.

Collagen: What It Doesn't Do, You Don't Need on Prezi

To be honest, I don't like this one as much as my prezi on the properties of water. Oh, well!

A Question

Although up to this point, I've been extremely satisfied with the process of SBG, I've started thinking about one negative aspect it may have. I've realized that I currently have all threes and fours, which means I've earned a 95 in the class. Now, what would happen if, one day before the semester ended, I did a sloppy blog post that merited twos across the board? Would that one mistake negate the work I've done for the rest of the year?

Then, consider the flip side of this coin. Suppose a student did nothing the entire year, but one day before his or her cumulative grade was posted put together an exceptional piece of work--one that deserves entirely fours? Would this earn this person a perfect score for the class?

It seems to me that any grading system should reflect the student's knowledge of the entire curriculum--not just what content was covered most recently. But how can this hole in the system be fixed? The scores for each standard cannot be averaged--one runs into the problems that are present in the averaging system.

The more I reflect on this problem, the greater its magnitude seems. The grade that will go on my transcript should reflect my understanding of the entire world of biology, not just the content area that I have most recently learned. 

I'm curious to see how this problem will be resolved--and I hope some other SBG'ers will comment and give me some ideas. 

Various Popes...Or Possibly Other Kinds of Benedicts

In the past couple of days, we've been mixing various foods with Benedict's solution and iodine to observe what kind of sugars (saccharide units) were in each.

Now, I'm not the kind of guy who likes "Well, it works that way because it does!" I prefer to know everything possible going on in a reaction such as this one.

So, I tried to go a little deeper. Although I'm not quite perfect on the details yet, I'm pretty sure I have the general idea.

Benedict's solution is nothing but a copper sulphate (Cu⁺²) mixed with alkaline solution. When a simple sugar is heated, it loses an electron, which goes into the copper. This reduction makes the copper Cu⁺¹. Now, it can react with oxygen to create copper oxide, creating the orange-ish color that indicates the presence of a mono-or-di-saccharide.

Ok...so I guess that might not have been very in depth, but hey...close enough?

Notes on Molelecular Structure

I thought I'd just go ahead and post my notes from today. Since these are notes, taken during class, these are disjointed and not exactly a masterpiece of the English language.

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Shape matters in biochemistry! Simple structure changes have profound effects on the chemical properties of a molecule.

Monosaccharides often do not stay "mono." They bond together and become disaccharides--for example, glucose and fructose become sucrose. Double glucose is maltose, and glucose and galactose become lactose. (Lactose-intolerance is caused by lack of an enzyme that breaks the glucose and galactose bonds.)

Then, there are polysaccharides. "Simple" sugars (monosaccharides) are combined many times (a condensation reaction--water is released). For example, many glucose molecules are combined to create amylose. Amlopeclin is very similar to amylose, but has extra branches. These are considered starches.

Glucose can be combined (through condensation reactions) to create glycogen. This chemical is found in human cells, particularly muscle and liver tissue. Cellulose is when the glucose chains are "flipped." Between these chains, hydrogen bonds can be found. Because of this, these can be used to create structural support (such as a cell wall in plant cells).

Cellulose cannot be broken down (for the same reason that causes lactose-intolerance--the lack of an enzyme that can do so.)

Bugs are crunchy for the same reason--their exoskeleton is formed from chitin, which provides support because of the hydrogen bonds.

Ok...Why Not?

First off, an apology: I've been devoting quite a bit of time to trying to decide which artifact to embed in this post, and none actually doing it, so I decided to just go ahead and type this up.

We've been discussing biochemistry in far more depth than I had ever been exposed to, and I'll be honest: I'm not quite keeping up. More accurately, I haven't quite understood the intricacies of the molecular structures.

However, today especially, I started to figure out what's going on. Let's start by going all the way back to the pH scale.

Let's start by examining a simple, well known chemical formula: H20.  Everyone I've ever met knows that formula's water. You could find someone wandering around Siberia and they would know about H20.

Some more thoughts on water:

On the pH scale, it's neutral (7).  Why would this be?

To answer this question, we have to look in more depth at the pH scale. As a number gets farther and farther away from 7 (all the way to 0 and 14), it gets either more acidic (smaller numbers) or more basic (larger numbers). Acidic substances have more H⁺, while the more basic, the OH^- increases. When these two quantities are equal, the substance is H20--or water.

Then, today, I watched as a carbohydrate's bonds broke and separated water and carbon within the carbohydrate. These bonds breaking created quite a bit of heat.

Finally, I'm currently in the process of wrangling with polymers and monosaccharides and monomers and glucose, and fructose, and...well, I hope you get the idea.

The idea that a simple swap of a pair of atoms within a molecule is particularly striking to me. Mr. Ludwig explained that the only difference between glucose and galactose is one side group that is in a different location. As I understand it, this is simply because different reactions can occur with different parts of the molecule (but correct me if I'm wrong!).

Anyway, I'll keep working on the more advanced regions of biochemistry, and once again, sorry that this took so long!

Big Foaming Chemical Reactions!

Here's the write-up from our experiment on the quality of different antacids. Contributors were myself, Seth Nixon, Kiel Heerding, and Tyler White.