Last Science Solutions post!! See you in August!
    Sexual and asexual reproductions have their similarities and differences. The Venn diagram at the bottom of this post shows how.  
     There are very few organisms that reproduce asexually. The main ones are bacteria and cells. Asexual reproduction is when only one parent is needed and an exact copy of the parent is made. 
     There are more organisms that reproduce sexually. Even plants! It's kind of disturbing to watch - scratch that; VERY disturbing!!!But, we need the species to live on. I can't think of any animals that reproduce asexually. Think about it, wouldn't be weird if you were walking along and you saw a cat making a copy of itself? I would be traumatized!! Just the thought scares me....that will haunt me now....
     Animals, plants, humans and many other things reproduce sexually. In order to make this happen, a male must deliver sperm into the female and the sperm and egg must meet for fertilization to take place. Female animals don't have their period every month like humans do. Some animals give birth to more than one baby at a time. This happens in humans too, but is is less likely. The American Alligator reproduces sexually (see Zoo Project for more information). 

    Have you ever wondered what would happen if a surgeon worked on you when you were the first person he worked on; he had only did animal dissections. Can you imagine how scary that would be? 
     Last week in science, we did two separate dissections. We did one on a squid, and one on a frog. The frog one was disturbing because I felt like I betrayed all the frogs I play with in my grandma's backyard. It was very gross. I made my partner do most of it because she was used to those kind of things. After a while, I began to get used to it. I pushed the thoughts of betrayal out of my mind and just focused on the learning experience. We also got to name it. Our frog's name was Cheetos. The squid was awesome! I felt like I was leaving my partner out. We started taking turns. Because she named the last one, I named this one; Squiddles. No matter what, us and the group of girls across agreed our squids would be a couple. Both turned out to be boys. After an awkward silence, one girl shouted out, "Gay couple!!" So there's that. After we took it apart, the teacher fried it for us and I had my first taste of calimari. It was surprisingly good. 

(No school on Monday; Memorial Day) 
    When you start at the cornea, there is a short pathway leading to your brain. The cornea is in the same area as the lens. The lens is a clear cover that covers the pupil. When people get cataracts, the lens gets very cloudy. This can be fixed by a simple procedure where the surgeon removes the faulty lens and replaces it with a plastic one
     We dissected a sheep's eye not too long ago. The pupil is just a hole leading to inside the eye. When the light goes in, it travels through the aqueous humor: a jelly-like filling inside the eye.  When it reaches the back of the eye, it hits the retina. The crazy thing is that everything we see is upside-down. Our eyes are so complex that they actually got me thinking about how it would be if we didn't have that advantage. Would everything be on the ceiling, like, defying gravity?? I'm an insomniac, so I have lots of time on my hands.
     The image/light will eventually reach the optic nerve: the nerve that connects our eyes with our brains. 

     There was no blog post yesterday like we normally do for science because we've been working very hard on a project on a website for a certain animal at the Fresno Chaffe Zoo. Time flew, but I'm pretty sure we did just fine. The worst part was we got the most boring animal ever, the American Alligator. It just sat there. We had to stand there for like 5 minutes and take notes on its behaviors. Seriously?? It did nothing! We left for a few minutes and when we came back, he/she had moved from the water to the grass, but we didn't see it move.
     I learned a lot from this project. I mean, I had the basic idea of an alligator and its behaviors. Like it eats zebras, which is messed up because I love zebras (they're white with black stripes, by the way). I was surprised because I thought they were more active. The alligator did nothing, which was disappointing, but overall, the trip was fun. The research we did made the alligator seem very nice and tame, but you have to remember what dangerous animals they are. A lot of people get attacked, and that is never good. The research definitely changed my view of the animal. They aren't as bad as they seem. They are actually pretty interesting. Not in person, of course; they're super boring in person. The alligator was very long; it had to have been at least 7 feet long. It was very cool. Good thing it wasn't hiding like a lot of other animals were. 

     You usually see rainbows after it rains. Maybe you're playing in the sprinkler. At just the right angle, you can see a rainbow. Why does this happen?
     After it rains, there are still very tiny droplets of water in the air. They are so tiny, that just by looking in the air, you will never see them. The droplets act like prisms. We know when light hits a prism, a rainbow forms. These droplets work together and they each reflect the light, making a rainbow appear. When in the sprinkler, there are also water droplets in the air. The only difference is these drops are bigger. They can still act as prisms and create rainbows. 
     Rainbows aren't just a pretty sight. They are also a very complex, scientific matter. Rainbows have colors in a certain order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. These are refered to as ROY G BIV.

     My last post was why I thought the sky was blue. Doing some research, I found out I was way off! With my dad's Einstein brain power, he helped me understand what all this meant.
     As we know, the atmosphere reflects light. This keeps us from burning to death (even though it already seems like it in the summer). The light from the sun shines down. It scatters light just like everything else does. The only color we see is blue because the other ones are reflected. Take for example, look at anything around you: a chair, a book, even your cat. The colors are being reflected so we only see the blue chair, the red book, or the black cat. All the other colors are gone. It's pretty cool when you think about it.
      We did several experiments to help us better understand this theory. We used mirrors to show how distance does affect the size things appear. A person next to you seems way bigger than a person 4 meters away. Maybe the two people are the same height. They appear to be different. We looked through a little box at a light and we say a mini rainbow. According to the color light we looked at, the rainbow appeared different. 
     Back to the sky, I originally thought that it was blue because it was reflecting off oceans. I saw that in a movie once, but never bothered to do any further research. Now it seems pretty cool.

     This blog post may be inaccurate because we were not allowed to do any research. Mr. Kimbley just wanted to see what we knew off the top of our heads about why the sky is blue. I really have no idea, except from what I learned on SpongeBob, on why the sky is blue. 
     I think maybe the sky is reflecting off the oceans and the sky absorbs all other colors, so we see blue. I'm not very good at this kind of stuff. Maybe the atmosphere acts like a prism bending light? I have no idea. Outer space is dark when the sun is on the opposite side of the world, so all we see is moonlight. That's the only thing that keeps the sky from going completely black to where the point where we can't see anything. 
     Stars aren't much help when it comes to lighting up the night sky. They're very far away, therefore making them dim. That doesn't help much, does it? I was in the country one time and we couldn't see our hands in front of our faces; that's how dark it was. It was very different from the city where street lights light up the entire town. 
     

     The big question is how did they get there? Well, back billio of years ago, all continents were together, creating Pangaea. Pangaea Was just a huge land mass that was all stuck together. The animals lived in different regions, but then the regions were split apart. The fossilized remains remained in those areas. 

     Our group's research project is about the American Alligator. The American Alligator lives anywhere between North Carolina and Texas. They live in water, such as marshes, lakes, rivers, etc. They are carnivorous, meaning they eat only meat. Their diet consists of mammals, amphibians, and other animals that share the same habitat.
     The American Alligator reproduces in a strange way. Their ritual is bizarre. The female is the caregiver to the babies for a year, then she sets them free. The male mates and leaves, which is kind of messed up, but it's nature. 
     The American Alligator is in a habitat in the Chaffee Zoo. It's near the rainforest exhibit in case you were going to visit it there. It is amazing!! It has to be at least 10 feet long. It's a whitish color as are all American Alligators. I just stayed there at that exhibit for a few minutes because it was past Isabella's nap-time and we had to get home. It is my second favorite animal (besides the zebras).

     In my opinion, the most important discovery in science is the aging of rocks. How else would we know what the earth was like before us? We have to use fossils of either imprints of bodies of ancient animals. We know about dinosaurs, trilobites, and other things that would have been a complete mystery. All of the things about ancient animals and plants was before any sort of documentation, so it would have been left unknown without rocks containing fossils.