My Science Box

  Students will use the information they have learned about the evidence scientists use to prove the theory of evolution in a real life look at an authentic question about ...

  Students will use their knowledge gained of both the habitats, and types of adaptations that animals use to survive in their environments.  They will create a fictitious animal that will ...

  The purpose of this lesson is to start a dialog on the importance of adaptations to a species and individuals survival.  In the end students will understand how animals use ...

Week 1 - Pretrip

Monday - Observation Mariposas in the classroom, camouflaging into the room, see whose lasts the longest between 6th and 7th grade.   

This series of activities is designed to complement a semester long introductory biology course for non-majors (general education) at a 4 year university. These activities are designed to be used ...

Performance Tasks Students will be able to design an organism that could live in Pt Reyes, both today and what adaptations it would need in order to live there in one ...

Big Ideas It is a big concept for students to comprehend, that we live on a dynamic Earth that is continually changing.  What is even harder for them to grasp is ...

Here's my current syllabus for an introductory college biology course for undergraduates planning on entering elementary teaching. This is NOT your traditionalcollege biology course. The goal of this course is ...

Inspired by observations of finches on the Galapagos Islands, Charles Darwin came up with an idea that is perhaps the most influential idea in all of science - natural selection. ...

Sickle Cell Anemia
Sickle-shaped red blood cellsSickle cell disease is a disorder that affects the red blood cells. Red blood cells use a protein called hemoglobin to transport oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. Normally, red blood cells are round and flexible so they can travel freely through the narrow blood vessels.

Patients with sickle cell disease have a mutation in a gene that codes for part of the hemoglobin protein. As a result, hemoglobin does not form properly, causing red blood cells to be oddly shaped. These irregularly shaped cells get stuck in the blood vessels and are unable to transport oxygen properly, causing pain, frequent infections, and damage to the organs. Patients with sickle cell disease only survive to be 20 to 30 years old. About 1 in 500 babies born in America has the disease.

The normal hemoglobin nucleic acid sequence looks like:
T A C C A C G T G G A C T G A G G A C T C
A T G G T G C A C C T G A C T C C T G A G