Dr. Fleetwood’s Blog

Go to my wiki page located here.  You will see two links (Exploring DNA and DNA Structure).  You should visit these pages in the order presented and view the JMOL interactive models at those sites.  These are very cool 3-D models that you can manipulate to understand the structure of DNA.  After you view the first site (Exploring DNA) and while you are viewing the second site (DNA Structure), you should answer the questions from the Question Sets you received in class.  A copy in pdf format can be found here.  Please don’t just rush to answer the questions.  Take your time to investigate and appreciate the beauty of DNA and of these modeling programs.

Due:  Monday, 1/30/12

You should go to the Intel Science Fair website located here: http://www.societyforscience.org/isef/document.  Once  there, you should read the Student Handbook and look at the Category Descriptions.  After reading those two items you should think of a project for which you would like to research and conduct an experiment.  You should then type a proposal.

The proposal must be typed and include the following things: Problem, Hypothesis, Independent and Dependent variables, the purpose of the experiment, and a brief procedure.  The purpose of the experiment should be two or three sentences on why this is an important problem to study.  The problem, hypothesis and variables must be something that can be measured.

1. Problem or question

2. Purpose (why are you doing this project? How does it affect society?)

3. Hypothesis (this must be measurable)

4. Independent variable

5. Dependent variable

6. Complexity
• Complexity of science fair project is very important.  Your project cannot be a lab experiment you did in high school or middle school.
• Your project should not be a simple music oriented behavior problem.
• Your project must not be a race or gender based behavioral experiment.

7.  Brief procedure

Things to note:  The most important thing is to choose a project that interests you.  Think of the the things you have read about or learned in school and which of those seemed to excite you the most. Try to design a project around one of those topics.  It is also important that your project be important and deep enough to be worthy of not just a high school science project but a Charter School of Wilmington high school science project.  Consider that as you determine your project.

Due: Monday, January 9, 2012

Read chapter 1 up to section 1.9 (proteins) and answer these chapter 1 questions.   For now we will concentrate on carbohydrates and lipids so answer questions 1-16.  We will answer the remaining questions later.

Due: Monday, 12/19/11

• producers, consumers (primary, secondary, etc..), autotrophs, heterotrophs, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores
• 10% rule (energy flow through a web), trophic level, biomagnification (toxins through a web), carrying capacity, limiting factor, abiotic factors, population density, exponential growth, logistic growth
• niche, competitive exclusion principle, invasive (non-native) species, symbiosis (mutualism, commensalism, parasitism), mimicry, predator/prey dynamics (graph of predator/prey cycle)
• cycles – water, carbon, nitrogen
• vertex/vertices, edge/arc, directed edge, digraph, redundancy, resiliency (with repect to a food web/ecosystem), shortest path, longest path, keystone species, weighted edge, mathematical model,
• biomes, graph of biomes (temperature and rainfall)
• human body systems (digestive, skeletal, etc… basics from handout)
• levels of organization – everything we talked about, such as: ions, isotopes, water properties, polar, surface tension, capillary action, prokaryote, eukaryote, parts common to all cells, etc…