biology

For years mothers have told their children to eattheir vegetables.  When it came tothose odd orange ones called carrots, they often gave the reason that eatingcarrots would improve eyesight, especially vision in the dark – just likerabbits.  By some this isconsidered an old wives’ tale, others think of the link between vitamin A andeyesight and dutifully eat their carrots. The story of carrots being linked to good eyesight first became widespreadin Britain during World War II. Coinciding with more successes at shooting down enemy bombers, newsstories appeared in Britain crediting a special new diet with an incr

In the early1900’s, scientists discovered that humans have different 4 types of blood: A,B, AB, and O.  The distinctionsbetween these blood types are based on different carbohydrates and proteinsthat compose the cell membranes. Each of the different types produces different antibodies and antigens(1).  This system of classificationhas proven to be important because different properties make some blood typesincompatible.  For example, if aperson with Type B blood needed a blood transfusion or organ transplant, thedonation could not from a person with Type A or Type AB blood because Type Bblood makes antibodies to the antigen of Type A blood.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Baltimore, my hometown, probably knows the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in North America, is not healthy. The thought of Fells Point on a humid night in July or August wouldn’t be complete without the ubiquitous smell of the harbor after a storm, when all of the trash has been washed toward shore. It’s fairly innocuous, just present if you take the time to notice. However, for a few weeks of summer 2007, the smell wasn’t just present, it was overwhelming. Massive die-offs lead to hundreds of decaying fish crowding Fells Point and the Inner Harbor, the parts of town responsible for tourist revenues, and where my sister worked at the Maryland Science Center.

I have always been interested in language. When I was small, I discovered my love of etymology through vocabulary tests. I realized that I remembered words much more easily if I knew how these words were “built”, so to speak. For instance, the word “decimate” was much easier to memorize when I knew that it basically meant “to kill one in ten” in Latin. Eventually, my love for language grew; so much, that I am probably going to major in one, if not two foreign languages here at Bryn Mawr. So it was very fortunate for me when Professor Grobstein recommended that I

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, Vonnegut acts as a first-person narrator who tells a story

of the evolution of people from the 20th to the 21st century. Vonnegut’s evolutionary story

mocks the human race, and more specifically the human brain and its intellectual in creating

technological machinery that is almost as useless as the brain.