A Baby's Gaze May Signal Autism

A Baby's Gaze May Signal Autism

This is another article from the New York Times about a study published today in Nature where researchers reported that the earliest behavioral sign that a child is likely to develop autism is when and how long a baby looks at other people's eyes. 

 The study found out that babies between 2 and 6 months of age who began spending less time looking at people's eyes paid less and less attention to eyes as they grew older and later on were diagnosed with having autism.  On the other hand, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people's eyes until about 9 months old, and kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.  The researchers used an eye-tracking system to figure out the babies' attention to people's eyes.

I think that this research is a major, major find for not only the science community, but for everyone, especially expecting parents.

The End is Near!!

The End is Near!!

This picture is from today's New York Times showing the contrail (which is the trail of 'white clouds') of the asteroid that passed over Chelyabinsk in Russia this past February 15.  

So basically, scientists are saying now that the Earth is much more vulnerable to these asteroid strikes than previously thought.  In research to be published today, Peter G. Brown, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario, states that such strikes could occur every decade or two.

The Chelyabinsk asteroid was 60 feet wide and traveling at 40,000 miles per hour releasing energy equal to 500,000 tons of TNT.  That's so crazy! and scientists are claiming that more these could be crashing towards Earth?!  The end is near everyone haha

The University of Hawaii already received a grant of $5 million from NASA to set up telescopes to scan the sky for quick moving lights that could be on-coming asteroids. 

This is what that telescope looks like :

http://fallingstar.com/

Alley Pond Environmental Center

This is definitely another place to visit! My Natural History of NY class spent another day at the Alley Pond Environmental Center in Queens by the LIE. Another nice spot to explore and find adventure and also to find out about the natural NYC environment!

I found this beautiful flower while walking on the trail and my professor said it was Queen Anne's Lace.  It looks pretty and even has a pretty name too.  It really does look like lace!


I found this beautiful flower while walking on the trail and my professor said it was Queen Anne's Lace.  It looks pretty and even has a pretty name too.  It really does look like lace!















This was a little babbling brook with watercress in it.


















These are pictures of Phragmites, also known as common reed.  They are EVERYWHERE in Queens wherever there is water nearby!

Queens Zoo!


So, I'm taking a course at Queens College called the Natural History of NYC, which is an awesome class to learn about the different animals and plants that are in the NYC area even though we have to memorize about 400+ organisms, BUT as I am aspiring to be a bio teacher, it definitely helps to know some of these organisms.

So, every week we go on a trip to find and identify different organisms that we have learned and on one of the days, we went to the Queens Zoo! I had lived on Long Island almost all my life and I had never been to there (actually I didn't even know that it existed! - -;;). Anyways, this is a wonderful little (compared to Bronx Zoo) outdoor zoo right near the NY Hall of Science. There are so many different birds and ducks there and they have a really cool dome shaped aviary that you can walk through and observe birds flying all around you. Birders, you guys should definitely check this place out!

Here are some of the pictures that I had took on my visit:

  

This is a female (top) and male wood duck.

               This is a snowy owl, just like Hedwig from Harry Potter!

Bald eagle up close! Couldn't believe it wasn't flying away!

This is the duck pond with beautiful fall foliage showing!  There were so many different types of ducks, I couldn't believe it!

 

Elusive Water Monster found?!?!

This is a picture from the New York Times showing the elusive magical fish called the OARFISH.  This extremely rare, 14 foot, female oarfish was found washed ashore in California.  It also had 6 foot long ovaries with hundreds of thousands of eggs.  Five days prior, there was another oarfish, male this time, that was found in Santa Catalina Island, California also.  This amazing creature has gotten marine biologists excited because people just do not know much about them since they are never really caught in nets or by hooks.  According to Dr. Milton Love, a research biologist at the Marine Science Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara, they are, surprisingly, bad swimmers because their long bodies are still while their fins undulate to propel themselves.
Some more interesting facts about these oarfish from the NYTimes article are:
- large larval tapeworms and spiny-headed worm were found in the intestines of the male
- some posterior parts of the male oarfish were missing, which ichthyologists speculate that they can shed parts of their bodies below the abdomen like lizards do with their tails
- they are the world's largest bony fish
- some say they live 500-1,000 feet below surface, others say they spend most of their time near the surface. (now that would a super scary encounter in the water!)
- they may be able to change gender as in life stages
- Japanese myths say that washed-up oarfish are a sign of a coming earthquake! (~20 oarfish washed up in Japan before the 2011 earthquake and tsunami)

Mmmm..that smells gooood!

Let's take a moment to appreciate our sense of smell.  Think about the smells that we love:  the smell of Thanksgiving morning, freshly brewed coffee, a new book, a new car...doesn't it just make you feel happy?Isn't it also amazing how certain smells can trigger a certain memory?  My sister once had a very bad experience with deli turkey slices, where she had a turkey sandwich when she was sick and ended up throwing up shortly after eating it.  From that point on, even the smell of deli turkey meat will make her grimace and turn away.  As the most primitive sense we use, it does a pretty good job of affecting our moods, behavior, and memories.  Also, if we think about it, we can identify SO many things just by the sniff of our nose!  Foods, drinks, objects, and even people!

Speaking of smelling people, have you ever thought a hot guy or girl smelled awesome?  A college professor

mm sweaty t-shirt!

of mine once mentioned a very interesting experiment that involved a group of college ladies sniffing a bunch of guys' t-shirts also known as the "sweaty t-shirt study."  Claus Wedekind et. al. were trying to find a relationship between olfactory mechanisms and sexual selection.  Well, these researchers had a bunch of guys wear a plain white T-shirt for a day, and hung up these shirts in a room.  Then, they had a bunch of women come into the room and smell each shirt while rating which wearer she thought was more attractive.

i <3 my opposite

And the results???  It turns out that these women preferred guys that had dissimilar DNA to their own.  And why would this be important??  The DNA that the researchers examined were of the MHC (major histocompatability complex) which are cell surface molecules that mediate the interaction between our immune cells and help to recognize invaders.  And the more diverse the MHC genes of the parents are, the stronger the immune system of the offspring because the immune cells will be able to recognize a greater range of bacteria, viruses, etc.

Sooo ladies, our sense of smell can potentially affect our mate choice!  So go smell your boyfriend and if you don't like his "scent" maybe he's not the right choice for you!

As a Living Environment student teacher, I think that this experiment would be a great motivation piece for a lesson on body systems, immunity, or sexual selection.

Hello there all!! 
The purpose of this blog is to show how simply COOL biology (and science in general) is and how it affects EVERYONE (and to pass my class hehe).  As a teacher-in-training, I have definitely learned the importance of trying to get our kids motivated, but how with the smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter constantly feeding them with updates about where their friends are every second of the day and pictures of food, cats, babies, and what not?!  

Well, I believe that every single person is a scientist.  For some people it may be deep down inside them, but YES, you are a scientist. You just need some reminding.  If you've ever asked "why?" or "how?", you're a scientist.  Ever wondered about life on Mars or better yet, wondered about anything at all?  You're a scientist.  The need to know and to find out is in all of us ever since we were born!

One of my professors had told our class about how his 3 year old twin boys were using the scientific method! At the age of 3!  Basically, the boys wanted to test out whose hot wheels cars were faster.  So they had first tried to push them at the same time, but realized they needed to make sure that the cars needed to be released at the exact same time and place.  They went through many trials tweaking their method here and there and tried to create a fair test with accurate measurements of their results. They were totally being scientists!

Anyways, I feel like I've written enough! But I still want to reiterate (again) that we are all scientists whether you like it or not!  We need and want research and evidence so that we can confidently and satisfyingly say, "My hot wheels is better than yours."