Science Class Response

During the first trimester, one thing we did was dissect owl pellets. An owl pellet is a mass of undigested remains of a meal that is coughed up by an owl after consuming its prey. An owl regurgitates,food that is already swallowed is ejected from the mouth, because an owl does not have teeth. This means that since the owl can not chew the prey it swallows it whole. Then the prey enters into the digestive tract. This part of the stomach has enzymes and acids to aid in digestion. Next,the food travels to the second part of the stomach, the gizzard. The gizzard is a muscular organ that grinds the food and ”filters” indigestible parts from traveling into the intestines. The pellet is formed from the hair, bones or feathers that are left in the gizzard. The pellet will take several hours to form and several more before it is regurgitated. The owl cannot eat again until this pellet is expelled.
I found this dissection very intriguing and i learned a lot. I liked putting the bones of the prey together and figuring out what animal i had. The hardest part i think was finding the toes and fingers in the mass of hair yet it was still fun. I would like to do this again someday and cant wait for other experiments this year.

Science Current Event 2

This article is about a scientist, Jay Neitz, and his team at the University of Washington. They led a research to help give monkeys a more colorful life. These Squirrel monkeys, Sam and Dalton, lack the proteins that enable them to see red and green. They gave one of the monkeys a helpful virus to give them the proteins they need to see these colors, while the other ate the same food like usual. To test their experiment, after 20 weeks they showed the monkey a grid of colored and grey dots. For an award of getting the correct color they got grape juice. Before the gene therapy they could easily see yellow and blue dots, and now Sam and Dalton can pick out the colors, red and green

I believe this is a hard experiment to determine if it did work or not. I think this because you can't see what they are seeing and it could possibly be that they are seeing different shades of blue and yellow, like it says in the article. Also, I wonder how they knew what gene they needed/ what virus they needed to take to improve their eyesight. Lastly, i wonder how they came up with the idea of improving a monkeys eyesight to see more colors. I would love to hear more about their story and if it did help colorblind people see again.

Source:

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20090930/Note2.asp