Jolyn's Blog for Hotdawgs

Dear future biology students, My name is Jolyn Tran, a student of the Class of 2020. I started the year as a scared, timid fourteen year old who had no idea how different high school would be. I took english with Wissolik, geometry enriched with Hamilton, Spanish 2 with Yeilding, leadership as a class representative, world geography with Ellis, orchestra with Boitz, and of course, biology with Mr. Orre. I didn't know how to high school. All I knew how to do is finish homework and study for test. I was never really engaged in any of the school subjects, which is something you really want to figure out, and forgot all of the material I learned after the day of the test. I was only invested in school activities, like marching band and clubs. I thought that I would fly through this class with ease, but I didn't until the end of the school year.  Mr. Orre expects you to be respectful when he or someone else is speaking... so shut your yap and listen. He never really got mad ...

What we found after thirty minutes My project, which I titled "Clean Waves for Babes", embodies what I wanted to see in the future: clean bodies of water. I hated seeing plastic floating in the waters of Santa Cruz. Although I struggled in the beginning (very much so...which you can read about  here ), I found my way back to a goal that not only I can achieve, but the humans on earth. What I did was two clean ups: a beach cleanup and a creek cleanup the following day. Instead of collecting the waste with plastic bags, I decided to use reusable buckets. I filled THREE whole buckets at the beach! The creek cleanup was also a success. My group filled an entire garbage bag of shards of glass and plastic bags. I believe that it's going to be an annual event for Saratoga High! In the beginning of the project, I would have given myself a B-. I had all the information to carry out my plans, but never followed through. The concepts were good but were too intricate. They w...

In replace of a video, I decided to write about it instead of show it. External Anatomy: Usually, the fetal pig is a light beige/ off pink color. To dissect it, you must tie down the wrists on the plate to have the ventral area exposed for dissection. The wrists of the pig is cut out of the diagram, but just like humans, it would be located near the ends of the arm. The shoulder is spread openly, which can be found after the elbow of the arm. Digits are essentially the fingers and toes of a pig. They are connected to the wrist, at the end of the arm. Those two structures allow the pig to move. The thoracic cavity is everything from the diaphragm and up. We'll talk about what goes into that portion of the pig later. The abdominal cavity should be everything below the thoracic cavity. To determine the sex, you look at the urogenital opening. On males, it should be located near the umbilical cord. For females, the opening is near the anus. Digestive System: In a digestive sys...

On May 20th, I arrived at the Calabaza Creek in Cupertino. My friends and I participated in the river cleanup that was an event created by the leadership class. For about three hours, we walked along the creek, looking for trash, but overall, the creek was decently clean. The only thing we found an abundance of was shards of beer bottles (I think). There was the occasional plastic straw or bag, but not as much as I was expecting. I even made new friends from the other classes and got to know them through trenching across the puddles of water. I realized how much fun helping the community is and the satisfaction of creating a better environment for the leaders of tomorrow. 

A recap of what my project is all about: I decided to host two different cleanups. One was a beach cleanup at Capitola Beach last Friday, May 19th, and the other was a county wide river cleanup on Saturday, May 20th. I chose idea after countless of other failed attempts for this project. I wanted to impact the bay area, and besides having cleaner beaches and rivers, the main goal was to educate students about the importance of clean bodies of water and be one step closer to a pure environment. Below are the flyers I made for the two events to get the word out. My initial plan for this project is not the plan I ended up doing. If you look back on my last few post about my 20-Time, they've been changing since day one. When I finally settled down on this idea, its was already the midway point of the project. For the goal of my project, I knew that if I wanted it to be successful, I'd have to spread the word out, hence the flyers. I wouldn't call this whole experience su...

This unit was all about taxonomy and classification. It was first created by a Swedish botanist in the early 1700's. He founded the system of binomial nomenclatures that separated themselves into eight levels of organization. This is still used today! The broadest category would be the domain which it divides into three: archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. The next level would be kingdoms. Eukarya contains of protista, fungi, plantae, and animalia. Fungi and plantae can be easily described, or easier than animalia. Animalia has over fourteen different, major groups, or phylums. There are chordates, arthropods, echinoderms, and etc. The next levels, in order, would be class, order, family, genus, and species.  Even though this unit was pretty lengthy, I wish we could have expanded on more concepts. I wish we applied the classifications in history, like how would we classify dinosaurs and other animals that can be found in the geologic timeline. This also goes with out last unit, and y...

In this project, we created a timeline of Earth's history, which is broken down into eras, periods, and epochs. One of the major events that happened was the formation of our planet. Occurring 4.5 billion years ago, massive rocks collided and used the power of gravity to pull other rocks within it. Without this huge collision, we wouldn't be standing here on earth today! Another major event would be the when oxygen became more abundant 2.4 billion years ago, creating breathable air for us.There is a hypothesis about how the first oxygen caused the entire planet to freeze, this event would be called a "Snowball Earth". Lastly, the most distinctive and notable event would be the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. There are many theories as to why the dinosaurs vanished. The most common explanation would be the asteroid hitting the Earth and vaporizing. It killed off about 80% of species, and the remaining would evolve into the feathery, flying animals you see t...

My last post was about how I was stuck in which topic to do for my project. So my FINAL IDEA is something completely different. I suddenly realized that I had no passion for this project anymore. After all, passion is suppose to motivate you and fuel the fire in you to keep going and be 100% invested. After all these post, I came to the conclusion that I have NO interest in chemical detectors or whatever. I was stuck in a hole. A dark, empty hole where I can cry and let go of my troubles. But in this hole, I reached out to Mr. Orre, who told me not to cry and he only wants to see his students grow, not be in crippling depression, whether they haven't had any visible progress at all "/ Well, I thought to myself, I may haven't had any tangible work done, but I have learned so much over the past couple of weeks. Maybe I did semi-okay. Okay now onto the NEW NEW project... Recently I got in contact with Mr. Galleher for the leadership class at shs. I wanted the school to get ...

This unit was about evolution and what goes into a population evolving. Within a population, there are different traits which are called variation. When artificial selection occurs, that is when humans want a specific trait in an animal, that can create a new species overtime. Charles Darwin was an expert about evolution and natural selection. From the observations he made, he conjectured two conclusions: 1) The fittest win and 2) Populations look like the winners. Natural selection is a factor of evolution, which is a process of using the winners of the populations and passing their traits to their offspring to survive. We simulated a species in the real world and how the chances that they survive with different traits. You can read about it here . The gene pool is the sum of variation in a species. Species is a group of individuals that can reproduce and have fertile offspring. Speciation is the formation of new species, and it is caused by reproductive isolation. Evolution is a th...

1. In this lab, we simulated a real world population. For this species to survive, they have to eat and survive in order for their population to not go extinct. 2. The phenotypes that were in this population were the stumpys, knucklers, and pinchers. The phenotype that was the best at capturing food were the pinchers. They had the most precised way of picking up foods, while the other two struggled with the handling of foods. 3. The population did evolve. The "a" allele became more common than the "A" allele. During the first trial, they were almost equal, but eventually the "a" allele surpassed. The last trial shows that the gene frequency of the "a" allele was around 78%, making the "A" allele at 22%. 4. A factor that was random was the placement of food. Depending of the scatterness of the food, the different phenotypes could have had an advantage. An event that was not random was the time we had to collect the food. Every ph...

My original plan for my 20-time project was to have an Earth day fair and inform students about environmental issues. Unfortunately, it was unrealistic to think that I could get a day, let alone a week, to educate my peers. I have two ideas to replace my project, but have been struggling to choose which one would be better. The popular, Taiwanese-tea based drink goes by many names: boba tea, bubble tea, pearl milk tea. Whatever you call it, you are familiar with its contents, the little black balls of starch. Also, known as tapioca pearls, these chewy spheres are extracted from cassava roots, native to the north region of Brazil, and now spreading throughout South America. It is said tapioca pearls are “one of the purest forms of starch food”. A german study shows these pearls are linked to cancer. The cancer-causing chemicals are known as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. The tests were held in Taiwan, where the toxic man-made chemicals are made. American producers for tapioca...

This unit was about ecology: the interaction between organism and their environment. In all environments, there will always be producers and consumers. In a food chain or web, the consumer or producer is shown obtaining energy from something else, but that doesn't necessarily mean an organism. Energy can also be found from photosynthesis or the primary producers in an ecosystem. When a product is consumed, only ten percent will be passed on to the next trophic level. More into depth about organism, we learned about population and the factors that impact the amount of organisms. Immigration, births, emigration, and death are all factors that can fluctuate the statistics. Our world is almost reaching its carrying capacity, the maximum population size the environment can hold. Today, we have about 7.5 billion humans in the world, but it is said that our carrying capacity is 14 billion. We are over HALF way there! What is going to happen when we reach that limit? The nutrient cycles- w...

What is 20-time? Glad you asked! In Mr. Orre's biology class, we are working on a long term project that we are passionate about for 20% of our class time each week. By the end of this project, the goal is to achieve a solution to the problem you are concerning or complete a major portion for a greater good. My 20-time doesn't have an essential question, but a dream goal: I want more people to be aware of their surroundings and the planet we live on. I feel that most people would use an educational pamphlet to hold their half chewed gum or a google slide would be nap time for high school students. My 20-time is educating Saratoga High students and making them more environmentally conscious with a whole week (during the week of Earth Day) dedicated to problems affecting the environment, such as energy conservation, pollution, ocean waste, etc. At the end of the week, we could have a fair with different booths, similar to a club day, but more about the environment. This project...

pGLO Observations , Data Recording & Analysis 1. Obtain your team plates.  Observe your set of  “+pGLO” plates under room light and with UV light .  Record numbers of colonies and color of colonies. Fill in the table below. Plate Number of Colonies Color of colonies under room light Color of colonies under UV light - pGLO LB 8 Tan-ish/white, opaque Light purple - pGLO LB/amp 0 No bacteria No bacteria + pGLO LB/amp 1 Tan-ish/white, opaque Light purple + pGLO LB/amp/ara 4 Tan-ish/white, opaque Neon green 2. What two new traits do your transformed bacteria have? The transformed bacteria, which is the dish that contain LB/amp/ara, glows underneath the UV light. This is an effect of plasmid that turns the bacteria into a green fluorescent color. The plate also carries agarose sugar, the only thing that can make the bacteria glow if the plasmid is not present. The bacteria was resistant to...

Unit 6 was all about biotechnology, the application of biology. It is"the study and manipulation of living things in order to benefit mankind". Today in the modern world, biotech is used in many different fields: industrial and environmental, agriculture, medical and pharmaceutical, and diatonic research. We also went into extensive detail about gel electrophoresis that can be read in previous post. We learned about polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which is a process to amplify a specific DNA region. It's usually used to detect diseases and such. rDNA, recombinant DNA, is similar to PCR except it is specifically to insert DNA of one organism into the DNA of another organism. A main topic that was enforced repetitively was the idea of bioethics. That is the study of decision that have to be made because of advances in biology, medicine, and technology. I thought this unit went by a lot faster than the other units. Maybe it's the personal interest I had with the co...

Today, we extracted food dye from different candies and compared them to commonly used artificial food dyes. I know candy is bad for you, but c'mon, how bad is chocolates and sweets? We read how "foods were colored with substances that were not safe to consume, such as bread whitened with chalk or cheese made yellow by lead tetroxide". We tested orange skittles, yellow reese's pieces, green mike and ikes, and blue M&M. You can say our lab was "sweet" success *crickets*, not really, but I'll get to that later. We were given focus questions to answer about today's experiment. 1. Stated above, we have four different colors; orange, yellow, green, and blue. The reference dyes that our teacher provided, did not have a reference for our green candy dye. Also, we left the gel in the electrophoresis chamber (which you can read about in my previous post) for over 40 minutes, when it instructed for 15 minutes. The dyes "ran" off the end of the...

Our assignment is to record two smart goals for the second semester. One goal that I WILL achieve is to stop procrastinating. This has been my weakness for a very long time, which has put my grades in risk. First, I will stop taking six hour naps and start my home right when I get home. My lengthy naps force me to finish homework around two o' clock in the morning, making my concentration during school ineffective. Also, to achieve this goal, I'll stop using my phone during homework and studying time. Like the teenager I am, I'm on my phone 24/7. This use to not be a problem, but now I'm addicted to whatever that distracts me on social media. From Instagram, to Facebook, to Snapchat, to even Facebook Messenger. By taking away all my distractions and naps, I'll have a better understanding on the concepts I am trying to learn, especially in biology. My other personal goal might take me a long time to accomplish but with the right mindset, I know I'll do it. I WI...