Quotes
The first of many posts with quotes. These are ones that don’t have a date. I may have already posted some.
“So, do you get your chloroplasts from your dad?” -Unicorn Tongue
“Do you not like me enough to saturate me……with insulin?” -Lost Calculus
“Seagulls are green.” -Chucklehead Ditherbag
“Don’t look at my cheese like that.” -Princess Kitten
“They’re not doing anything, they’re just on top of each other.” -Daisy Monkey
“Why would I, of all people, nut your butt?” -Modern Rustic Industrial Contemporary Cow
“Clouds are the consolations of the night.” -Princess Kitten
“I is become not.” -Princess Kitten in response to “Try not to be high in math.”
“It’s probably rounded because we calculated it with numbers.” -Mr. Everythingcancels.
Photosynthesis/Respiration
Seriously, who cares?
Well, too bad - you kind of have to care.
Photosynthesis turns up a few different ways on the regents. Here are some key words that should immediately make you think of photosynthesis:
- chloroplasts/cell wall
- autotrophic nutrition/autotrophs
- photosynthetic
- anything having to do with plants (remember, photosyn. is only in plants)
- energy
- sunlight
- and know the formula: carbon dioxide + water + light energy -> oxygen + glucose
And here’s something all my students have trouble with: ALL ORGANISMS PERFORM RESPIRATION. NOT JUST ANIMALS. Here are some respiration trigger words:
- aerobic/anaerobic
- mitochondria
- cellular
- ATP
- energy
- glucose and oxygen
- breathing
- yeast
- and know the formula: oxygen + glucose -> carbon dioxide + water + ATP energy
By the way, if you forget either formula, they are the same thing but backwards! Know one, and you’ll remember the other. The energy is just in different forms - photosynthesis uses light energy (in photons from the sun) and respiration makes chemical energy (in the form of ATP).
today's science fact is about an animal/plant fusion: Elysia chlorotica!
E. chlorotica is a sea slug that literally sucks the chloroplasts out of algae and preserves them to use for photosynthesis. Once a baby slug ingests enough chloroplasts it can potentially never have to eat again, relying on the sun for its energy needs. Recent studies have found that the slug encodes and expresses plant genes encoding chlorophyll- the green pigment used in photosynthesis- which needs to be continuously replaced in chloroplasts.
