No rain today and no rain in the foreseeable future ... I have given up watering except around the house. Stayed after school to see the MS softball game but evidently it was cancelled. I will check our bees this weekend, feeding any weak hives and putting in some hive beetle traps.
We started our Paper Plasmid Lab today in hopes of gaining some understanding of how plasmids are constructed and how genes are added to plasmids to make bacteria into small protein factories. We are going to homeroom first block but I think we can finish in the morning. We are looking at our first test next Wednesday and will start our review Monday.
In Selected Topics after taking a few notes over photosynthesis. We simulated how an enzyme (a protein) works in speeding up a chemical reaction. One student in each small group was an enzyme breaking toothpicks (our substrate). We raised the temperature from room temperature, to hot, to very hot, to boiling by altering their binding sites (their hands) with duck tape. We collected data today and will graph it tomorrow to finish the lab. The purpose of this lab is to demonstrate that environmental conditions (temperature and pH) change the shape of proteins and can reduce or stop their activity ... why plants don't grow well in cold temperatures and why you can die with a high fever.
We will start our review for our first test tomorrow .... biology test over Unit I next week.
In Computer Science, most students are working on our final Karel problem ... Mission Impossible. No help on this one ... as we finish our study of computer logic and head to Microsoft qBASIC next week.
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