The chestnuts are sprouting!

Last year, I talked about the American chestnut, enormous trees that were once the cornerstone of the eastern forests until it was wiped out by a fungal blight, and how after a hundred years of attempts to bring them back, researchers finally managed to genetically engineer a tree that was immune. We naturally backed the fundraiser, and were sent three wild-type chestnut seeds to plant.

Each of the science classes planted one of the nuts, and they've all sent up shoots!

These sprouts, beautiful as they are, are doomed.

They're not the genetically engineered nuts and have no immunity to the deadly blight. But with luck, they'll last several years before dying, long enough to crossbreed with the new breed of chestnut and preserve their genes. And we'll learn a lot about growing chestnuts from them, so we'll be ready to care for the immune chestnut seeds when they're ready.

Expanding hagfish slime

Science 3-5, as promised, here are the videos about hagfish and their amazing slime.





Also, remember the makeup class is next Monday and if you can't make it, you need to pick up the worksheet and cabbage juice now.

Our Final Class: Planets and Space!

For those of you who missed it, a great illustration of the relative sizes of our planets, our sun, and the rest of our universe. For another way of looking at it, here's a great comparison based on the stars as grains of sand idea.

We spent the rest of the day on the distances between planets within our solar system, which are even more jawdropping in scope, and why we wouldn't want to live on them. Some planets are so cold that they don't even have liquid nitrogen on them. Others would rain burning death upon any colonists.

And on that exciting note, we ended our final class of the year! I hope everyone learned a lot and did at least some of the homework. Summer session begins next week, and next year's fall session, when it's finalized, should begin in September.

Fossils and prehistoric life!

Since we didn't spend much time on the fancier fossils, here's some examples:



This guy is one of the first creatures to figure out jaw structure and teeth. It doesn't have individual ones. Instead, it's grown a massive, massive jaw that has a jagged edge.

The quality of a fossil depends on many things. Look at this amazing fossil.

In addition to how incredibly fine the rock grains were, this fish must've been buried immediately after death while mostly undamaged. That's why the fine tissue was preserved.





This is a very important fossil. This fossil is of a marine reptile, which for a long time were believed to crawl up onto the beach to lay eggs despite the fact many of them had body types that didn't seem able to do it. But they were airbreathers, which means they couldn't lay their eggs in the water or the fetus within it would drown. Here, we see what appears to be one who died while giving birth, meaning they gave birth to live young instead.

Here's another fossil showing the great detail you can find in stone if it's just the right kind.

It's a sea spider from the Devonian era. Sea spiders, despite looking like spiders, have a whole bunch of weird traits and are clearly only loosely related, leaving scientists incredibly confused about what they were related to and if they evolved from more conventional spiders to add those weird traits or if they were really primitive and had the weird traits because proto-spiders all did, but the rest lost them. Read more on Wikipedia, they're great.

Some definite insect fossils:

Look at this! Wings evolved surprisingly early in history.

And here's a sea scorpion.

And below is the fossil that first made people realize dinosaurs could have feathers. It was discovered in Germany, in particularly good limestone.

Let's wallow in the oceans some more.

Or maybe we could not wallow! Maybe we could frantically try to swim away to try land and then run and never stop.

No? You insist on more? Why?





This guy is an example of how very hard it can be to reconstruct animals from fossils. Unlike a lot of those gorgeous fossils, we mostly have the teeth of this one, which were in this spiral shape. Currently, scientists believe instead of it having the teeth externally in a sort of razor-toothed tongue/tentacle, the spiral was internal and allowed it to have a similar constantly regrowing teeth thing going on as the modern shark. The smaller teeth would be in the center of the spiral, and as they grew, they would move upward until, at full size, they reached the animal's mouth, then were torn out by struggling prey or fell out on their own to be replaced by fresh teeth.



Did I mention the horrible fish with the giant jagged bone jaws is gigantic? It is dunkleosteus, osteus meaning bone because they are solid bone, and it is absolutely gigantic.

The only consolation I can offer is that with those huge teeth, it may have focused on larger prey than your tiny, helpless body. Or maybe not. We don't know.



This shark is extinct. While this may seem terrible, it almost certainly wouldn't have bothered you, because it was busy devouring whales. It might tear open your boat and cause it to sink, but it probably wouldn't eat you afterward! Something else would.

You may know this one as the Loch Ness monster. From what we currently know about this general type of animal, its long neck was not like a swan's bendy one but stiff, although we aren't sure how much. It also does not appear to have the muscles to raise the head above water like that.

There's very low visibility in water, so the current theory is that its long neck meant its prey couldn't see how massive it actually was in time. They'd only see the tiny head and think it was a small fish.



See this guy? He's the size of a schoolbus. Look at that friendly smile!

Remember the Permian extinction? This enormous thing shows up shortly AFTER that extinction (a mere eight million years!). Scientists are very interested. One possibility is that it's one of the animals that can function normally at a low size, including reproducing. A few of the tiny ones squeaked by on whatever tinier things they could eat, having babies who squeaked by in turn, then when conditions improved, they were ready and able to grow to their horrifying, horrifying size.

We don't even know their max size was schoolbus. It could be the even bigger ones didn't fossilize.

In conclusion, if anyone says, "Wanna go in my time travel machine?" the answer is obviously yes, but don't go in the water. Tell scientists that you've about to go to the past in a time machine and ask to borrow a robot camera to dump in the ocean instead.

On a less scary note, can you figure out what real fossils these guys were inspired by?

Check out this website for more cool creatures.

Volcano demonstration, new bat, and Reading Rainbow

If you want to repeat the volcano demonstration at home, it can be made by putting wax chunks in a glass jar, covering them with sand, and then covering the sand with water. Put a thin layer of water in a shallow pan, then put the jar in the water, then heat. The extra water will boil away, helping the glass warm up more evenly so it doesn't break from the heat. Once it's gone, the glass will continue to heat from the bottom up, and the wax will melt and shoot through the sand to harden in the water.

A new species of bat was discovered! 

Finally, there's a kickstarter for Reading Rainbow. Check it out!

Evolution games!

A bunch of short games that have to do with evolution!

A more difficult game that models the random unfairness of evolution.

Remember:

Creatures have extra babies because only the fittest survive!
Mutation is random and usually not helpful!
But without mutation, a species would die out every time things changed!

In conclusion,



Can you identify the mutations?

When Genes Go Weird

Some cool mutations:

Navel oranges.


Navel oranges are an orange that has another, tinier orange growing inside instead of seeds. Because of this, they're sterile. All naval oranges are clones of the original mutant tree!


Fruitflies.

The gene governing location has mutated, so that legs have been placed where the antenna would normally grow. Similar mutations can swap around eyes and wings. Flies can have legs where their eyes should be, eyes where their wings should be, and wings where their antenna should be.

Dolphins.

This is an albino dolphin. Most albino animals are white because most animals have fur. Since dolphins don't have fur, they look pink, much like albino humans.

And this...

This is a dolphin with "legs", a set of extra flippers in the place where long ago, its ancestors had limbs. In modern dolphins, the leg buds disappear before the dolphin is born.

Chickens.

Back when birds were dinosaurs, they had teeth. Teeth are much, much heavier than beaks, so birds lost their teeth, but the genes to grow teeth are still in their DNA. With a bit of tampering, scientists managed to get chickens to grow tiny teeth again.

Humans.



Our ancestors had tails and a lot of the genes for them remain. Babies in the womb all have a partial tail midway through development. In normal humans, the genes to grow a full-sized tail are turned off and the genes to break down the partial tail before birth are on. Every now and then, a mutation messes this system up.

And speaking of mutations messing up, all humans possess the genes to make vitamin C, but it's been disabled by mutations. One day, science may find a way to alter humans to fix the genes and turn it back on. Until then, we have to be sure to eat food with vitamin C in it!

Finally, here's some photos of Stumpy, the four-legged duck.