The Body

Hey everyone!

We've completed our exploration of the lungs/heart and the oft-overlooked lymphatic system, then examined a squid to see how it contains similar structures, such as hearts, proportioned very differently, such as how the squid had two secondary hearts each in charge of pumping blood over its gills. Finally, we examined dead dragonflies under the dissecting scope and then dismantled them.

Here's a really interesting discovery about the interaction between a california side-gill slug and a spanish shawl. The california side-gill slug has a very simple nervous system, so it was thought to only have a sequence of behaviors much like one of the robots programmed in Robotics class, but this showed it learned to recognize the spanish shawl as bad prey. Also check out the images of the spanish shawl's amazing WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING ME NOTHING THIS COLOR IS GOOD TO EAT dance.

Next week, we'll begin learning about genes and evolution. We touched briefly upon this when talking about how a squid's beak started off as its shell and how human and squid nervous systems evolved independently, and we'll now dive in to how that information is encoded and how errors in that information is where all diversity on earth comes from.

Finally, here's a video of the song Frozen translated through many different languages and then back into English, with surprisingly few errors. It won't be long at this rate before we may have near-perfect machine translations, allowing people anywhere to communicate with each other!