dna

being the biogeek that i am, i was looking forward to learning about dna. however, i actually slept in some of the classes. and they were good naps too.

understanding dna
in general we spent the lesson watching videos and going through slides. i think it would have been more effective should we have been allowed to go through the stuff ourselves.

there was this video where some guy explained how deoxyribonucleic acid was named what it's named. oddly, it got me all excited about learning chem next year. it's ironic in so many ways, really.

oh yes, i forgot to mention this, but i found out in the previous lesson what rolling a tongue and having a widow's peak actually meant. please don't inquire as to what i thought they were before that lesson. on a less important note, my individuality chart trait number is 23. A PRIME NUMBER! huzzah.

karyotyping
snip, snip. got to play with my favorite scissors today, cutting paper and all. it was really not too bad, learning about all the different disorders one can have just by having one more/less chromosome. it's also a tad bit scary....

what if my child(ren) has a disorder like that too? D:

dna extraction
finally, a practical.

it's to be expected that we didn't use any hi-tech methods whatsoever to extract our dna. nope, not at all. just spitting out some 100-plus like we do every day.

haha anyways, despite having to weather that weird experience and having a test tube stuck under my armpit for fifteen minutes, it was pretty cool when i saw my dna... speck. yes, something turned out wrong somewhere, rachel couldn't see hers too. i'm slightly jealous of the peeps who could see their dna strands.

this lesson had me appreciate how much more awesome the bio lab is compared to the chem and physics labs. it's so much cleaner, smells so much nicer, looks so much more glamorous. but then again if you compare it to the RA labs the bio lab falls flat on its face.

you see, winnie? this is why you must get into bio ra. and geog ra too!!! :>