Pippin's Question Box

What food group do mushrooms fall under?

I think that mushrooms belong in the vegetable food group because they are high in water and low in fat. Peanuts and beans are classified as meat because they are high in fat, which mushrooms are not, therefore, they are vegetables. Also, mushrooms are sources of minerals and vitamins. They have a high density and are important sources of vitamin A, vitamin C, riboflavin, folate, iron, and magnesium, as do all vegetables. Therefore, I think that mushrooms fall under the vegetable food group. I got my information from these two sources:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jul2001/995573163.Gb.r.html

and

http://www.answers.com/topic/food-groups

Literature: Wooden Bowls

Wooden Bowls

In my opinion, the story, Wooden Bowls teaches an extremely important lesson. The theme, or moral, of the story is to respect your elders. In this story, the parents realize that they should have respected the grandfather, since he is their elder and elders should always be respected. They realized that they should have overlooked the grandfather's messy eating, since he is family, and you should enjoy life with your family. This is important because family time is quality time and the four-year-old's parents forgot that when they were small, their parents cared from them and didn't ban them from the dinner table, even when they made a mess while eating. They forgot that the grandfather cared for them so much, and it was their responsibility to care for him in his time of need, which is old age. This story related to CARES because as a child, it is your parents' responsibility to care for you. When you grow up and your parents and getting older and less able-bodied, it is your responsibility to help them, the way they helped you. Furthermore, the story also related to empathy, because the grandson felt bad that his parents were treating his grandfather so rudely, and shows his parents how unfair they're being to the grandfather. I can connect this story to my life because my grandparents live in India. My parents and I can only see them once a year. When we visit them, we try to make them happy, by making their favorite foods, helping them out in the house, and most of all, spending time with them. To sum up, family is very important, and should care for family as much as possible, especially for your elders because your elders should receive your utmost respect.

Pippin's Question Box

Can you "bake" a pie in a microwave- or will it just explode?

I think that you can "bake" a pie in a microwave because the pie gets warmer when the heat from the microwave transfers to the pie. But, you need to microwave the pie in a metal container, otherwise the plate gets burnt. However, the pie won't be cooked well, so it is better to bake it in the oven.

I got my information from http://home.att.net/~mrmicrowave/docs/youcanusemetal.html

Basic Genetics Homework

By going on http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/ , I learned many things about heredity and traits. First, I learned that a trait is a notable quality in a person. Each of us possesses a different combination of traits that makes us unique. Traits are passed from generation to generation. We inherit traits from our parents and pass them down to our children. I also learned that heredity is the passing of traits from parents to child. Children look like their parents because we "inherit" some of their traits. Our genes are made of DNA and they live in our chromosomes. We all have thousands of genes and the environment we grow in, as well as our genes, help define our traits. Humans have two complete sets of 23 chromosomes, totaling to 46 chromosomes in our body. When children are born, each parent contributes one set of chromosomes to the offspring, passing on genes to the child. That is what I learned about heredity and traits by visiting this interesting website.

Science Class Response

Owl Pellet Lab

My favorite class activity was the owl pellet lab. It was interesting to attempt to put together an entire skeleton of an owl's prey. I wasn't too fond of picking out bones from regurgitated owl food. However, analyzing the variety of bones, especially the small ones, was intriguing. It was amazing how putting together an entire skeleton from an owl pellet can show you how the owl's prey looked while it was alive. I enjoyed learning about owl pellets and dissecting owl pellets. Overall, this activity was very educational and fun, and I hope to do another activity like this again during the year.

Initially, before doing this lab, I thought that an owl pellet was just excreted waste. However, now, after studying owl pellets, I know that an owl pellet is a mass of bone, teeth, hair, feathers, and exoskeletons of the prey of the owl. Since owls don't have fingers and can't pick apart bones and fur from flesh, they swallow their food whole. Bones and feathers can't be digested by owls, just like with humans, therefore, the gizzard filters out the indigestible parts of the food. Several hours later, they are compressed into an owl pellet and are regurgitated when the digestive system has finished extracting the nutrition from the food. I found these facts interesting because they show the similarities and differences between owls and humans, and they display what all owls have to do just, because they don't have fingers. When I noticed this article posted on Sunny-D's blog, I read this interesting article on another mammal species found because of an owl pellet. The article said that Dave Tosh, from the School of Biological Sciences at Queens University, found the greater white-toothed shrew in Tipperary and Limerick because of some unusual shrew skulls that he found inside a few owl pellets that were sent to him by John Lusby, Barn Owl Research Officer from Bird Watch Ireland. This obviously shows how much you can learn about other animals that are the prey of the owl, just by examining an owl pellet.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080428071113.htm

Science Current Event #2

Are Wolves the Pronghorn's Best Friend?

As of 2008, the Wildlife Conservation Society has made a new study that cautions that removing the gray wolf from the protection of the Endangered Species Act may result in a decline in the pronghorn species. Since wolves are larger than coyotes, they decrease coyote numbers by either killing them or by causing them to shift to safer areas which are not inhabited by wolves. Healthy wolf packs balance out the coyote population, and the fewer the coyotes, the more pronghorns because coyotes and pronghorns have a predation relationship. Wolves are too big to feed on pronghorns themselves, since a small pronghorn won’t satisfy their empty stomachs. The wolves feed on coyotes, providing themselves with food, and reducing the amount of predators for the pronghorns.

Therefore, I think that in a way, wolves are the pronghorn’s best friend. The relationship between the pronghorns and the wolves is commensalism, a type of symbiosis that benefits one animal and does not affect the other. This is because when wolves eliminate some of the major predators of the pronghorn, its population increases since they have a longer life due to their greater chance of survival. I think that the gray wolf is safe to be removed from protection under the Endangered Species Act because their reproduction rate is increasing, as well as the gray wolf population. It will not necessarily impact the pronghorn population because the amount of gray wolves is not decreasing. If an unexpected drop in the wolf population does occur, then the gray wolf should immediately become protected by the Endangered Species Act again. Otherwise, as the Wildlife Conservation Society predicted, there could be a decline in the population of the pronghorn species. Therefore, unless a drastic drop in the wolf population occurs, I think that it is safe to remove them from protection under the Endangered Species Act.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080303145300.htm

Science: Current Event #1

In Geneva, Designing a Global Climate-Alert System

During 2007, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that it was likely that global warming could be an effect of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Their evidence proved that the gases emitted from the smolder of fossil fuels and deforestation travel into the atmosphere and enhance the greenhouse effect, causing global warming. Most of the idea of climate change has been proven by scientific work and experiments. However, the predictions for the future are still a little hazy because we have no mechanism to hypothesize what will happen in a warmer planet. New updates on climatology don’t come very frequently, about every five to six years. For our rapid global climate change, this frequency isn't enough. As Jane Lubchenco states, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), we have an urgent need for ongoing information about climate change, and we don’t have a mechanism to provide it. Lubchenco will be leading the US delegation at a World Climate Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. This conference, along with many others, could eventually allow scientists to predict climate-change just as they daily predict the weather. The NOAA issued an in-depth report about how the climate will change in America, which set the stage for the entire world. At the Geneva conference, it is planned to create a Global Framework for Climate Services. Also, scientists will try to agree on a plan to reduce carbon emissions and other pollution in another world climate conference located in Copenhagen, Germany that will also be occurring in the near future. For now, this conference might be the best we can do, but sooner or later, we will have to take more action.

In my opinion, this Geneva conference could lead to a series of steps towards achieving our goal of recognizing the causes of climate change. With a meeting of world-wide scientists, they can share ideas and cooperate to ultimately create the mechanism which we yearn for, the one that can predict climate change. I strongly believe that such a conference can only benefit us, and if it is followed up by a conference in Copenhagen, then we may actually be able to invent such a machine that will tell us if summer will be in the 90s range or the 70s range in temperature. An update on climatology every five or six years is simply not enough. We need to be able to know if this winter, temperatures will sky-rocket as opposed to previous years which will prevent snow, or if there will be freezing temperatures, the coldest the Earth has ever experienced. We need to know if we are really experiencing global warming, or if the Earth is just entering an Ice Age. This requirement for information can not be satisfied if we just get updates about every five to six years. We need information that comes every year, so we can plan for the next winter, or the the following summer. The NOAA has gotten a head start, hopefully beginning a trend of in-depth reports around the world. However, without collaboration across the globe and a consensus to solve this issue, the world needs to acknowledge the fact that climate change is happening right here, right now, and we need to do something about it before it is too late.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1919932,00.html