Geological Timeline

From this activity, I learned about the timing of many prehistorical events. I always considered events like the dinosaur extinction to be an incredibly long time ago. While it still is a long time, according to my standards, the distance between today and their extinction would only be 6.5 centimeters out of the total 450 centimeters. All in all, it's not that long ago when you compare it to the total history of the earth. The last 650 million-ish years on the timeline was filled with events and important details leading to today (like Mr. Wong's birthday). Before that, the timeline would have long spots of barely anything, as change was much slower and much less intricate back then. All of this timeline (which I believe is correct) relies on Darwin's predictions of evolution. Charles Darwin talked about how species gradually changed to become what they are now, and will continue to change indefinitely. The timeline shows examples of Darwin's teachings, as it shows the appearances of creatures like mammals, modern humans, and cells. Darwin talked about creatures appearing and changing, and that is exactly what the timeline shows. The timeline relies on and supports Darwin's theory.

Here are some pictures. The first is me with a part of the timeline, and the second is a picture of the most recent 650 million-ish years. The major eras beginning there are in bold. The third picture is the beginning of the Precambrian era, which started with the earth 4.6 billion years ago.

Jelly Beans

Extra credit jelly beans!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jelly bean necklace

In science class, we made a necklace of jelly beans that said a certain message when each color was assigned an amino acid. You can see the necklace I made on the bottom of the post. In class on Thursday, I translated this DNA strand to RNA, then translated it into amino acids. I took the first latter of the amino acids and found the secret message encoded into the DNA strand.

This translated into "Pigs sit still till mama has ham".

After turning it into RNA, I turned it into amino acids using this wheel.

Then I took the first letter of each amino acid and used it to decipher the code. When making the necklace, one jelly bean was one amino acid. Orange was phenylalanine, green was isoleucine, white was glutamine, brown was serine, purple was tryptophan, black was leucine, red was methionine, yellow was alanine, the big orange jelly beans were histidine, and the pink ones (used as a space) was a stop codon.

I had a lot of fun turning letters into a jelly bean necklace. Even though it was incredibly hard and annoying to string many jellybeans onto a tiny thread, the whole thing was fun! I see how hard of a job RNA has, because keeping track of every letter and different colored jelly beans was very hard, and I only got the message right by going back over and triple checking my work. RNA, though, can only do it once so I am amazed about its accuracy given that any mistake does cause a mutation and could cause cancer.

Oh yeah. Here's the pics of my necklace and me with the extra credit jelly beans.

Lunar New Year Celebration Extra Credit

Cultural celebrations have been a key part to advancing mankind. Throughout history, they have been ways to express similarities between each other about cultural and ethnic backgrounds. For example, China and Japan may not have the same opinions on every thing (since they aren't the friendliest countries to each other), but they both celebrate Lunar New Years and have previously bonded over the festival. This is just one of the countless examples of cultural celebrations brining together different groups of different ethnic background. Researchers estimate that about 50,000 different cultures exist worldwide and these celebrations are crucial to their existence and differentiation. Without cultural celebrations, there would be no major ways to tell these people apart. They differentiate us. Some early cultural celebrations trace back to early Alaska where the Makah people celebrated in prayer for a good hunt while whaling. This celebration helped them get food to survive. Form all this, you can see why cultural celebrations have been so important and why people have done them for so long.