Our curriculum this unit was focused on the relationship and function between cellular respiration and photosynthesis, and we investigated this through researching current events and making Tweets and blog posts about them, doing labs related to the subjects, and researched driving questions inspired by the unit.
In-Class Discussion:
Well, as the world knows the first patient in the United States has recently been infected with Ebola. Our class keeps up with current events, and as this disease affects humans, we have been following its progress and commenting through Twitter as well as composing blog posts early on. The link to my blog post is below: This section follows one of our largest in-class discussions, including hashtags to our Twitter page and facts that we have had conversations about. A man in Dallas, Thomas Eric Duncan, arrived in Dallas to visit a family member. He had just flown home from Liberia, but instead of a direct flight, Duncan flew to Brusses and then to the US.
On September 24, Duncan began to feel unwell, a flu-like sickness being one of the earliest symptoms of the disease. On the 25th he was sent home after an appointment at the hospital where he showed a fever of 103ยบ and severe abdominal pains. The hospital “regrets” dealing with the situation the way it did, and actually made a statement about how the nurse had refrained form mentioning his travel history, which it later took back. On the 28th Duncan returns to the hospital and is sent into isolation in the intensive care unit, as his symptoms had progressed to diarrhea and vomiting. The hospital staff begins treatment without proper preventative measures, and were only later fully enforced as the Center for Disease Control deemed fit. During this period Nina Pham, a nurse, began treating the patient and as the protective measures were not enforced, she became the first person to contract Ebola in the US. Along with Pham, it is believed 76 other workers may have come into contact with Duncan and been potentially exposed.
The girlfriend and three family members of Duncan were placed under quarantine until October 19th, which is supposedly the end of the 21-day incubation period, however some believe this period to be as long as 42. In a futile attempt to cure him, Duncan was treated with brincidofovir, and dies 4 days later. Pham drives herself to the hospital on October 12th and is diagnosed with Ebola. Oddly enough, she had reported a high fever two days before to the hospital, who knew she had treated the Duncan, and yet she was not quarantined until this moment. Instead of quarantining everybody who may have been exposed, the hospital again fell short in its preventative duties, and another nurse, Amber Vinson, was allowed to travel on a flight to Cleveland on the 13th, and two days later she becomes the second person to be diagnosed.
Obama admits that the US should have been more careful while dealing with Duncan’s case, as the hospital had been accused of extremely lax security measures for its staff and other patients. To finish off the story, the 76 employees who were thought to have been exposed are “urged” to sign contracts agreeing that they would avoid public transportation, instead of quarantined until guaranteed clear of the virus. Below is a BBC video that explains Ebola in 60 seconds.
Hashtags: #APBio3 #DoNowEbola
Experiments, Labs, and Presentations:
Anything involving color is always exciting, and to our pleasure, the first lab of this Unit our class was the chromatography lab. Having two parts, during the first half of this lab we used chromatography strips of different widths and lengths and drew thick black lines of marker on them. Submerging the ends in solvent, we quickly saw the pigments that black ink is composed of rapidly climbing up the paper, which eventually looked like this:
With the conclusion of this test, we moved on to testing the pigment composition of plant leaves. This investigation showed that leaves were composed not only of green chlorophyll a and b that we typically associate with chloroplasts, but also orange carotenes and yellow xanthophylls, shown below:
As the chlorophyll labs concluded, our class focused on expanding our knowledge of plant pigments and photosynthesis through a driving question investigation. The link to my Prezi is below, which investigated the relation of plant pigments to pigments found in makeup and paint.
