Allele

When I was little my mom had a story she would tell me about my eye brows--that they were painted by angels. And it's a pretty adorable story, right? Except these angels were rather ham-handed and dumped their eye brow paint into my eye leaving one of my greyish colored eyes with a brown stain and my eye brows lacking the dark hairy glory of my older sister. I used to gaze longingly at Emily's eyebrows and think of lost dreams that might have been.
Long after my mother's death, this story continues to comfort me. Sometimes as I'm putting on mascara I'll notice the paint stain and feel reassured by the love that would cause a mother to stare into the face of her baby daughter and notice every detail of her eyes. And since this mascara treatment is usually an attempt to get some other person to stare lovingly into my eyes...all I can say is that every bit of reassurance a girl can get is a precious gift.

But a newfound curiosity about eye color has sent me looking* into this phenomena in more depth. (*please appreciate my puns)  According to the internet it's called sectoral heterochromia. If my eye was completely brown instead of just one section it would be called complete heterochromia.

I teach a genetics unit to my 8th graders and we have a lot of fun with punnet squares and the kids love it because 8th graders are pretty egocentric and love talking about themselves. Just like me apparently, since I have a blog.

I'm on spring break and don't have any kids to teach so you are welcome to join my class today.

Quick Genetics Lesson
Every trait or characteristic we have is determined by our genes. Genes are pieces of DNA that each have the instructions for a trait.  There are different versions of a gene, each version is called an allele. Genotype is the combination of genes a person has, phenotype is the traits or characteristics a person has. If your genotype is two different alleles of a gene, whichever allele is dominant will be your trait or your phenotype.
Someone who has two different versions of a gene (or two different alleles) is called heterozygous, while someone with two of the same versions of the gene is called homozygous.

Or just watch this video:



Inherited eye color is easy to oversimplify, thinking that it's as simple as Mendel's pea color. But eye color is caused by several different genes (maybe other factors too). Parents with light colored eyes, tend to have kids with light colored eyes because it's a recessive trait to have light colored eyes. Parents with dark colored eyes can have kids with dark or light colored eyes depending on what genotype the parents had. But a little known fact is that parents with blue eyes can have a baby with brown eyes about 1% of the time; with no milk man involved.

So my Dad has blue eyes and my mom has brown eyes. I don't know if I am heterozygous blue/brown and ended up with blue eyes and only one part of my eye got the brown allele switched on, or if I'm homozygous blue/blue but my eye is damaged? Maybe I'm a chimera and I absorbed a fraternal twin at birth?

Eyes are just weird. Especially when they are featured in music videos with Bonnie Tyler.

Waxing Crescent

I sat at the beach and watched the stars for a while last weekend with a friend of mine. I really can't think of many things I love more than stargazing. As we sat there shivering and wishing Seattle at a little past midnight was a slightly warmer climate, I was struck but the gratitude that I felt for the experience. I knew that in a few short minutes I would be back in the warm car driving to my warm house and crawling under my heated blanket, but for that short time the entire heavens were clear and nothing could be more lovely than watching the moon slowly sinking below the Olympic mountains.

Wherein I Lose an Organ

So it turns out that that crazy "indigestion" problem I was having on Friday morning was my gall bladder freaking out. Ouch.

I woke up feeling a little, just weird, I drove to school and the feeling slowly intensified in the hour before school started. A few minutes into first period I stopped suddenly in the middle of what I was explaining about sciency things, looked down at the floor, then back at my students who are always 10 seconds away from crazy town and I could see that my pause had initiated a countdown, and it occured to me that this could only end badly. I hobbled over to my cabinet and pulled out a Planet Earth DVD (bless you BBC), negotiated with the technology and light switches, and sat down. My students seemed stunned but went with it. So their teacher's a bit weird, tell them something they don't know. I sat down, got back up--too painful, what in the world is wrong with me? Halfway through first period I was staring lovingly at the floor under my desk wondering if I could fit under it--the only thing I could think of is curling into a little ball. So I called the front desk and talked to the secretary:
Me: Somethings's wrong with me, I feel weird and sick all of the sudden.
Voice on the other end of the phone: Do you want me to call a sub?
Me: I just need my Mom or something.
Voice: I'll call the sub office.

I hope to never re-live that experience, which incidentally I guess I won't have to. Late Saturday night, after 36 uncomfortable hours, I finally dragged myself over to the ER and they admitted me and pulled that pesky little gall bladder right out. Ugh. But now I have to recover from the stab wounds.

It makes me miss the little guy.
 

Diagramming Forces

One of the perks of being a middle school teacher is that 7th graders offer no end of humorous anecdotes. I don’t know what class they’re writing all the notes in because I’m not finding very many lately but I did discover a couple of girls playing M.A.S.H. in their science journals on Thursday when they were supposed to be making plans for our lab. Instead they were making plans for their futures. Which, according to M.A.S.H., will be marriage to Henry and driving a green pick-up truck.

Come on kids! Stay on task.

The lab investigation the rest of us were planning was pretty cool though. We built little fan powered cars and had some races. Mostly the cars crashed into each other but the builders of the winning car won a hundred grand candy bar. I did not win.

Then we got down to some science and calculated the cars' speed and acceleration and diagrammed the forces acting on them. Of course you can’t diagram the force of awesome but you can’t ignore it either when it’s running amuck and crashing into everything. Needless to say it was a logistics nightmare. But I tend to enjoy my job in spite of the crazy. Unhappily, there was far too much screaming and not all of it was from delight; getting your fingers caught in a fan car is not pleasant. Teaching middle school is not for the faint of heart…

Please recall this boring teacher training and the awesomeness that ensued. http://quoththewren.blogspot.com/2011/11/fan-car.html

One of my students was complaining the next day that I'd gotten into her head. Apparently she's starting to think about free body diagrams whenever she sees things moving. I make no apologies. Seeing the world through science can save your life.

I avoided killing a dear, myself and my friends because of free body diagrams.

I was driving the stretch of I-5 between Mount Vernon and Camano Island late at night and I saw a huge deer running straight at my car from the right, but due to my vigorous physics training I immediately saw the entire situation with force vectors and velocities. I instantly realized that if I moved one lane to the left and sped up, the deer would hit me instead of me hitting the deer. I was already moving before I fully realized that I was doing a science. Heh. And that deer SMACKED into my car. But so much better than if I had smacked into it. Physics is always the right answer kids.


Watch this to learn more about diagramming forces:

May the force be with you.

Star Gazing

Yesterday I pulled into the parking lot at school and looked up at the moon as I was sprinting into the building (because I was tardy) and stopped suddenly in delight because Jupiter was so bright and beautiful right next to the Moon. 

Since school was starting about 20 minutes later (I can't believe how tardy I was); I thought maybe there was a chance I could take my first period class on a field trip. Yes, a field trip STARGAZING! During school hours. And really, I knew this was my last chance because daylight savings ends this weekend. So it was a race against the sun and the ever cloudy skies over the fair city of Seattle. 

I didn't take this picture, but someone in India did a few hours later and posted it on one of my favorite Astronomy websites. Yeah, I have a favorite Astronomy website, quit acting so surprised. This is pretty much what I saw and what inspired the field trip plans:

And another one UP CLOSE:

So I grabbed the 7th graders in my first period class and we ran out to the soccer field the second after the bell rang and the heavens smiled on us. Most of us anyway. The kids with glasses probably didn't see much because the sky was getting pretty light. Poor blind kids. But the annoying cloud cover was gone and the skies were clear.

Extra bonus, Venus was trying to outshine Jupiter in the East. 

The kids were amazed by both and even more amazed that they were looking at planets, not stars. 

But when some of the kids started running around with the soccer cones on their heads I herded those cats back into the school.