Category: Research

No, not relationships, and definitely not James. Today I’m discussing chemical bonds. Why? Well, they’re pretty interesting, kind of important, and I’m still Done™ with the world at large, so I figured I’d focus on the world at very, very small instead.

Covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonds are all prevalent in biology. For instance, without ionic bonds, the ions like sodium and potassium necessary for the body’s electrical impulses — which allow the nervous system to function — wouldn’t be stable, or able to dissolve. That dissolution is also owed to hydrogen bonds, which are most commonly seen in water. Because water is a polar molecule, its positively-charged hydrogen atoms are attracted to electronegative atoms, such as the chloride in salt. However, because the bond between hydrogens and oxygens in water molecules is a covalent bond, which is stronger than an ionic bond, the water stays intact and the ionic bond is broken, stopping its ions from neutralizing each others’ charges and therefore enabling the previously mentioned electrical impulses. These are only a few examples of bond types and their functions, but as I’ve illustrated, they’re imperative to human function.

So, I had to illustrate the cell cycle recently. Which, you know, Bio assignment, okay. Happens. But it wasn’t until I was ranting about it updating Mom on my progress that I realized a lot of people who haven’t covered it as recently probably don’t remember how it works. Because, let’s face it, that’s what happens with most of what we learn in school. Also, there’s plenty of diagrams for mitosis out there, but not enough covering the whole cycle, with interphase. So, because a quick refresher is good, and also because I put a lot of effort into making this legible when photographed and want to show off a little, here’s this handy model of the cell cycle.

In February of 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military personnel under the authority of Lieutenant General John DeWitt to relocate individuals of Japanese descent from their homes on the West Coast. The ensuing incarceration of American civilians stands as a shameful mark upon our history, both in concept and in execution.

I’ll start with the obvious — America is supposed to be a place of freedom. We have civil liberties and our supposedly inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the Army was permitted to round up innocents and send them to isolated camps in poor climates for the then unknown duration of the war.

Were they? Innocents, I mean? Well, let’s see. According to Paul Kitagaki Jr., “Fewer than 3 percent of them might be inclined towards sabotage or spying… and the FBI already knew who most of those individuals were.” So yes, the vast majority of the over 100,000 people relocated were, in all probability, completely innocent. Furthermore, though people of Japanese descent were targeted, individuals with German and Italian ancestry were left alone, despite those nations also being our enemies at the time. This suggests that Japanese-Americans were picked out for reasons independent of the war, which is an implicitly racist approach, as can be seen in John DeWitt’s statement, “A Jap’s a Jap. They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not,” and in the fact that his report leading to Executive Order 9066 was “filled with known falsehoods” (USHistory.org). Not only this, but the criteria for being “evacuated” was being at least 1/16 Japanese. That, for reference, means one of their great-great-grandparents was from Japan. In truth, most of the Nisei, Japanese-Americans born in the States, had never even been to the country they were suspected of holding hidden loyalties to. As Supreme Court Justice Murphy said, “…racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.” 

If this wasn’t bad enough, the details of the relocation proved equally detestable. For starters, the evacuees were given only a week’s notice, and instructions to bring only what they could carry. For most, this meant that their homes, their stores, and the majority of their possessions were lost, sold in a hurry and “often for pennies on the dollar.” (Library of Congress.)

After that, they were kept in “assembly centers” while the more permanent “relocation centers” were built. Assembly centers were usually fairgrounds or racetracks, not meant for human habitation, and the internees instead had to sleep in sheds meant for livestock. According to History.com, the Santa Anita Assembly Center “…was a de-facto city with 18,000 interred, 8,500 of whom lived in stables.” It goes on to state that, along with the poor housing conditions and the close quarters the civilians were forced into, the sanitation in most of the camps was also substandard and not enough food was provided. In essence, not only were their rights as American citizens systematically stripped away, but they were treated more like cattle than as people.

The relocation camps were better, but they were by no means good. There were ten permanent housing camps, two of which were on Native American reservations — despite the protests of tribal councils — and all of which were chosen for their remote locations. The climates were harsh, and, though the government hoped to make the camps somewhat self-sufficient, their choice of location meant arid soil that was less than ideal for farming.

Families, usually four or five to a building, were housed in tarpaper barracks without running water. They ate in communal mess halls, usually eating “mass produced army-style grub,” (USHistory.com) and used shared restroom facilities. While the internees were provided with education for the children and jobs for the adults, there was an ever-present reminder of their incarcerated status in the armed guards, watchtowers, and barbed wire keeping them there.

As time passed, added insulation to the barracks and a growing cultural flavor within the camps, each its own small town, made the incarceration more comfortable. At the same time, however, due to the forced and limited nature of their new communities, significant parts of the Japanese-American culture were lost.

In the informal social structuring of the camps, children played for hours unsupervised and often ate with their friends rather than their families. This directly undermined the traditional Japanese emphasis on close bonds and respect for elders. Also, as a Library of Congress article states, since jobs were only given to U.S. citizens, “The younger generation, as the breadwinners, soon began to take on leadership roles in the internee community, while the Issei, who had worked for decades to build up businesses and lead their families, found themselves sidelined.”

That was only one of the lasting impacts of the relocation. Despite the highly decorated, all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and their contribution to the war effort, Japanese-Americans were met with prejudice and hostility when they tried to return home after the war. Because of this, not only had they lost their property, but many were forced to permanently relocate from their towns of residence, and quite possibly from the West Coast altogether.

In 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and provided $20,000 to each surviving individual who had been interned. While it’s good that the harm the government caused was recognized and reparations were paid, the fact that it took 40 years for them to do so is infuriating, and perhaps as condemnable as the ordeal itself. After all, it’s one thing to wrong someone, and another completely to then refuse to acknowledge it or make amends.

The relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II was a continuous series of injustices, and though we have recovered as a nation, it stands as both a setback in the progression of American civil liberties, and a permanent blemish in our history.

This is, admittedly, more scientific and probably also shorter than my posts usually are, but I’ve been busy, so this fun micro-essay for AP Biology is what I decided to post this week. I hope that, at the very least, this encourages you to look further into the various theories and system processes in biology; it’s actually quite interesting.

The Theory of Natural Selection states, in priniciple, that the organisms with traits that are advantageous in their environments will be the ones that survive to produce offspring, or to produce more offspring than their competition, passing on the desirable trait. According to Endosymiotic Theory, eukaryotes were formed when a larger organism engulfed a mitochondria and/or a cholorplast, and, finding that it produced energy, kept it.

This, of course, makes perfect sense in explaining why eukaryotes rose in the evolutionary ladder. Where many organisms would still have been respirating anaerobically, producing only 2 ATP (adenine triphosphate) per respiratory cycle, the newly formed eukaryotes, with their mitochondria, would have been able to partake in aerobic respiration, which can produce up to 38 ATP per cycle.

With the increased efficiency of energy production, and the initial lack of competition over the oxygen necessary for aerobic respiration, the eukaryotic organisms would have had a massive advantage over their mitochondria-less counterparts, increasing their likelihood of reproduction to pass the trait on.

To reiterate, the acquisition of a mitochondria, and with it, cellular respiration, would dramatically increase an organism’s efficiency of energy intake, giving it a distinctive evolutionary advantage over other primordial life forms.

The period from the 1860’s to 1900, also known as “the Gilded Age,” was a time wrought with conflict between business owners and their workers. At this point in time, there were not yet many government regulations of industry, leaving business owners to do as they please. With dangerous working conditions, long hours and low wages, the workers stepped in–or rather, out–to demand change, and they were right to do so.

There is a saying that regulations are written in blood, and the Gilded Age is most likely where that originated from. According to Khan Academy, “Between 1881 and 1900, 35,000 workers per year lost their lives in industrial and other accidents at work.” This is because, without anyone standing up to them, the business owners could do whatever they liked, and they cared a good deal more about production and lining their own pockets (and houses — the History.com article has some incredible examples) with money than they did about the people they were exploiting, and killing, to do that.

It was during this time period that many unions, like the Knights of Labor, were formed, and strikes became a more common occurrence. Two notable such strikes were the Homestead Strike at Homestead Steelworks, where a gunfight broke out between striking workers and the “strikebreakers” brought in to forcibly reopen the steelworks, and the Pullman Strike, in which railroad workers nationwide refused to move trains in protest of wage cuts without proportionate rent cuts in Pullman’s company town outside Chicago. In both cases government troops, in the former case state and in the latter, federal, were dispatched to end the strikes.

Not much progress was made during the Gilded Age. Management would crack down on the workers who dared to speak out, and when the government did get involved they consistently sided with the businesses over the workers. While some rights were won, those were on a business-by-business basis, rather than government regulations protecting the rights of the people. As a whole, little was accomplished for workers’ rights during this time. However, these strikes and the continued expression of discontent would pave the road for labor laws and industrial regulation in the future, providing us with the much safer working conditions we have today.

The “Dust Bowl” is a term used both to describe the drought and dust storms of the 1930’s, and the Great Plains area in which it occurred. While the drought itself was an unavoidable natural disaster, its effects were greatly exacerbated by human activities, namely irresponsible agricultural practices.

    This is clear in the Dust Bowl’s conditions. After all, as awful as a decade-long series of droughts and high winds might be, it doesn’t account for the “black blizzards,” as they were called, storms that picked up Great Plains topsoil and carried it as far as New York. Dust storms, it’s true, were and are a thing, but never to this magnitude. That’s because, among other things, there’s just not enough loose topsoil to throw around. It’s estimated that as many as three million tons of topsoil blew off of the Great Plains during the infamous “Black Sunday” storm, and that was only one occurence.

    So why was there so much topsoil? That’s where human error and farming practices come into play. You see, one of the benefits of the native grasses that grew in the Plains is that they had deep roots that held the soil in place. But when settlers came and cultivated the land, they dug up those grasses in favor of other crops, like wheat. Increased demand for those other crops during World War I encouraged farmers to plow more land that had once been grassland, so that they could plant more, and when the prices for the crops they now had surpluses of dropped again, they plowed even more so that they could plant enough to make a profit. As a result, when the droughts hit and the crops died, there were no native grasses to stop the soil from blowing away.

    At some point, all of the best farmland was in use, and when the farmers kept on cultivating land, they had to move to poorer growing space. Unfortunately, “farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching.” (National Drought Mitigation Center) Other practices, such as using the new one-way disc plow, which increased the risk of blowing soil, and the abandonment of soil conservation measures in the interest of saving time and money, also greatly contributed to the environmental damage done prior to the droughts of the Dust Bowl. This damage, in turn, provided the means — that is to say, the dry, nutrient-depleted, loose dirt in abundance — for the catastrophic effects of what would otherwise have been little more than a severe dry spell.

    The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, bringing an official end to the conflict between Germany and the Allies. Unfortunately, by forcing Germany to shoulder most, if not all, of the blame for the war, the War Guilt Clause (Article 231) placed a heavy burden upon the German people.  The Treaty of Versailles had the opportunity to be a new beginning for all involved parties, regardless of where they stood during the war, and instead was used as the means by which the Allied Powers exacted revenge on Germany. This compulsion to act out of anger and selfishness, not compassion and mutual beneficialism, became a direct cause of another conflict only twenty years down the road.

The treaty was supposed to be a step towards a lasting peace, at least according to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. His plans “called for an immediate end to the war, the establishment of an international peacekeeping organization, international disarmament, open diplomacy, the explicit disavowal of war, and independence for formerly colonial territories.” (Khan Academy) This, though I cannot speak to how well or for how long it would have worked, would have been, at the very least, an attempt to pick themselves up, put the past behind them, and work together for a better future.

Britain and France did not approve of this approach. There were multiple reasons for this, but the foremost was that they were angry. Where America had been fighting “Over There” (song composed by George M. Cohan in 1917) and for less than a year, the French and British had been fighting close to home, if not in their own territory, for four years. They had lost men, supplies, buildings, and land, and they wanted Germany to pay for it. Germany was forced to give up its territories, drastically downsize its military, and, quite literally, pay the expenses. The total bill of reparations came out to a whopping $60 billion dollars, what would be over $760 billion today. A decade later this sum would be reduced to something slightly more reasonable, $30 billion dollars, but the damage was already done.

With reparations to pay and not nearly enough money to pay them with, the German government, then changed to the Weimar Republic, started printing deutschmarks (their currency at the time). Unfortunately, this had a reverse effect as the nation went into a state of hyperinflation and the value of the deutschmark plummeted, bringing the Weimar economy with it. To quote the History.com article on the Weimar Republic, “An underground bartering economy was established to help people meet their basic needs.” That alone should indicate how bad things were.

Regardless of Germany’s past actions, this should have been the point where the international community stepped in and did something to help. There is no excuse for willfully neglecting the welfare of an entire civilian population, yet the Allies did so for a whole generation. Even when they did act — which, admittedly, they did — their focus was on the reparations and resuming the payments, not on the suffering of the German people.

Between their loss in the war, their economic collapse, and the seeming indifference of their neighbors to their suffering, it should not be surprising that in their anger and desperation the German people turned to extremism, looking for new leadership and a semblance of hope. As Sarah Pruitt wrote, “Due to lasting resentment of the Versailles Treaty, the National Socialist (Nazi) Party and other radical right-wing parties were able to gain support… by promising to overturn its harsh provisions and make Germany into a major European power once again.”

As I hope I have made clear, the Treaty of Versailles, by its focus on revenge rather than rationality, was a direct cause of both Hitler’s rise to power and the Second World War, and while the treaty itself was necessary, many of its contents, particularly Article 231, the War Guilt Clause, were inevitably detrimental to not only Germany, but the whole of the international community.

Yes, this is a paper on space debris. No, the research is not mine, the writing is. Effectively, I was given a project on transitions with a bunch of bullet points and I had to connect it all into something coherent with enough flow to not scramble brains. I won’t show you what the original material looked like, but I promise the finished product is a lot better. And hey, it’s kind of an interesting topic, so here it is.

There is a lot of space debris floating around the earth. In fact, experts are monitoring about 200,000 pieces of the orbiting space junk, and they believe that there are more than a million out there. This space “junk” consists of burned-out rocket parts, pieces of spacecraft, and parts of defunct communication and weather satellites, the combination of which certainly makes the million-piece estimate feasible.
While some of these pieces break orbit and enter the atmosphere, not many of them actually make it all the way to the ground. Some have, but most of them  landed in the oceans or in remote areas of the earth. While a few people have been hit by space debris, it’s an incredibly rare occurrence, and therefore not a significant cause for concern.
What is a significant cause for concern is the damage that space debris can do — in space. There is a very serious risk that orbiting satellites and spacecraft could be hit by space debris, and this could badly damage the functional equipment. One of the more important — and more concerning — orbiting objects at risk is the International Space Station, as both a large piece of equipment and one with people in it.
There’s only so much that we can do to avoid these collisions, but we are trying. If sensitive satellites or spacecraft are on a collision course with space debris, engineers try to maneuver them so they can avoid impact. Possibly more importantly, experts are devising guidelines for those launching new space vehicles, like using orbits that avoid existing space debris. These guidelines would also make those launching new spacecraft responsible for safely disposing of their equipment after the completion of their missions, hopefully decreasing the accumulation of space debris and making space a little bit safer.

Occasionally, I go poking through old papers of mine to reminisce, and, just possibly, find something worth sharing. This one is an excellent example: a summary of the Peshtigo Fire that I wrote in fourth grade. Since I don’t think I say it in the report, it should be noted that Peshtigo is a town in Wisconsin. As I explain in the paper, the Peshtigo Fire has been largely forgotten — in fact, up until digging this up, I had forgotten about it, too! Historically, it’s lack of coverage is because it happened in a similar timeframe to the Great Chicago Fire, which was smaller, but in a more known area. Why I forgot about it, I have no idea. As for the rest of the information, I’ll leave that to my nine-year old self.

The Peshtigo Fire was caused by drought and harsh winds. The winds caught onto the fires the lumberjacks set to burn fallen branches. Due to the wind and the many little fires, a firestorm broke out. Firestorms are rare fires that form their own explosive gases. Also, due to the trees in the area, the fire had many flammables to fuel itself with. When the fire stopped, the forest near Peshtigo was a sea of scorched wood and ashes more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, this fire has been nearly forgotten, replaced by the significantly smaller Great Chicago Fire. On the same day the same winds stirred fires at both Port Huron at the tip of Lake Huron, and the cities of Holland and Manistee across Lake Michigan. It is a shame that only the Great Chicago Fire is remembered of all the significant fires that day.

Yes, the cat, not the car. Cats are very near and dear to me, as I may have mentioned in a previous post, but so are jaguars in specific. One of my favorite places to go is Guatemala, visiting the relatives I have there (I’ve mentioned that some time, I’m sure). Jaguars, being important to Mayan culture, a characterization that artist friends of ours used for my parents and I, and a cat, are a species that I feel connected to. As such, when I had a Biology project involving choosing a species to write about, you can guess what I chose! And here it is:

The jaguar is a prime example of a species being perfectly adapted to its environment. Its distinctively short legs, powerful jaws, thick skull, and its affinity for water all help it to maximize its efficiency in its native environment of remote Central and South America.

In the heavily forested areas in which jaguars live, camouflage is well-put to use and chasing prey can be difficult due to the myriad obstacles. With conditions as such, jaguars adapted to a stalk-and-ambush style of hunting prey that minimized effort while not lowering the amount of food intake. For this reason, jaguars have a short, stocky limb structure, which allows them greater success at climbing, crawling, and swimming, which are directly helpful in the above mentioned hunting style. For instance, they have been known to climb trees to ambush their prey.

When they reach their prey, they try not to leave room for a hassle, going in for a killer bite through the skull. They can do this thanks to their powerful jaws. In comparison to other types of cats, jaguars have slightly stronger jaw muscles and slightly shorter jaws, allowing for more leverage on the bite. The result is a bite which, relative to the animal’s size, is the strongest of any big cat.

Jaguars also have thick skulls, which, besides supporting their killer jaws, may be to protect them in the event of a fight. While jaguars have no natural predators, some of their prey can be just as dangerous. Besides many of their prey potentially outweighing them by up to six times, they’re also known to go after caimans as one of their many food sources. And while jaguars may prefer to kill by biting through the skull, they likely also prefer not to be bitten through theirs.

If it was being attacked by most any other type of cat, the caiman would probably be fine just to retreat into the water, but not with jaguars. This is another trait of jaguars’ that sets them apart from other types of cats – they don’t mind water. In fact, they’re excellent swimmers, a trait they likely adapted due to South America’s wide network of rivers, teeming with potential meals, such as fish, turtles, and, as mentioned above, caimans. Swimming is also a convenient trait should the jaguar have reason to cross a river, as a much easier way across than going around or trying to find a dry path over.

Jaguars are truly remarkable creatures, beautifully adapted to the habitat they live in. Their specialized limb structures, jaws, skulls, and swimming capability allow them to better hunt their prey without expending superfluous energy. Even if on an efficiency scale alone, these beautiful, well-adapted cats are to be admired.