TEqb

Tuesday, August 1

We've been doing a couple things lately.  After learning about prokaryotes and eukaryotes, we learned about phylogenies.  We learned phylogenies with a game where we had schmooms, which are aliens from a different planet, and tried to figure out which was the outgroup and ingroup and what the ancestors where.  We demonstrated our understanding of this game by doing homework and figuring out how many topologies you'd get from 3, 4, and 5 species.  There is a formula that shows the increase in species.  It's (2n-3)! / (2^(n-2) * (n-2)!).  Other homework was to draw a phylogeny and find the ancestral states of four certain species, which was a good way to make us think and connect how each one relates and see which species are closer than others. 

On Friday, July 28, we went to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  It was really exciting.  I actually followed the bus down in my own car, so I could go home straight after.  So, I missed out on the bonding on the bus.  When we got there, we went to see the first continuous reactor.  It isn't used anymore but was the start of making plutonium.  We also went to the mouse house.  Sadly, we didn't get to see any of the mice but we learned about phylogeny correlating with mice and how mice are the closest related mammals to humans.  We also got to learn about the five projects that the laboratory is working on at the moment.  One of them consisted of proteins, which is a field that interests me.  They suggested getting an internship there.  So, I was thinking of actually taking that opportunity.  We also got to go see the big computers.  That was neat.  The last place we went was to a place where they simulate live streams and see how different environments such as strobe lights affect the fish.  I thought that field trip was the most educational and helpful one so far for research.