Ask A Scientist

As many of us seem to be experiencing, the Ask A Scientist website is more like a "Post a Question to a 'Scientist' and hope that it gets answered" website, as answers to proposed questions are not being returned.  Regardless, I took some time this past week to merely talk with my colleagues at school regarding my question, namely our Biology teacher and 8th grade science teacher.  As I too would have guessed, mutations do happen quite frequently in our bodies, but are often manifested in non-harmful ways (i.e. freckles, "beauty" marks, etc), while others do not show at all (i.e. silent mutations).  Mutations that obviously do manifest as harmful are those such as cancers, which are commonly helped along by environmental influences. 

We copy 300 million cells per day via mitosis, so mutation is bound to occur, but it is not something that we need to dwell on.

Web 2.0

Prior to this week's application (2) assignment, I knew little regarding presentation tools outside of PowerPoint.  Now, do not get me wrong, PP is a great tool, but as I discovered this week, there are so many bigger and better tools out there!  This week I dabbled with Prezi and stopped right there.  I know that we were supposed to play around with a few other presentation models, but I absolutely loved how Prezi worked.  Not only is it easy to created text, images, and presentation flow, but it had a variety of models and templates from which to work from as well.  I have never worked with a presentation model like this one where individual "slides" can be panned in on at different angles, speeds, and sizes, so this was great!

The toolbar is not a typical "across the top" one, but is instead more modern looking and has many drop down sub-menus that allow one to investigate, crop, edit, and move various items in the presentation.  I find that becoming an expert at this presentation model will be challenging, but not as difficult as I had originally foreseen!