Brogan+Doran

=**Biology 111 Wiki page!**=
 * Hi guys... it`s Brogan Doran here :)**

HWK Post #1 – **Sickle cell disease**
Sickle cell disease is a blood disorder, well known as being defective hemoglobin. The sickle cell hemoglobin molecules are developed into the shape of a “sickle” hence the name. Because of the shape and stiffness of these cells, they are commonly grouped together, which make it difficult for them to circulate through your blood vessels. The most common problem with this cell disease would be the blockage that is caused by the sickle cell clusters in your blood stream, which leads to limited oxygen resource and blood circulation. Facts about sickle cells: The cause of this disease is by a genetic mutation. It is an inherited disease. The rule is that there are 46 chromosomes in total, and 23 pairs in each cell, it is said that the 11th pair of chromosomes has a gene that is responsible for normal hemoglobin production. If there is an error in the gene that is what causes the sickle cell disease. If you are to ever have any sings of having sickle cell disease you will most likely have the symptom of you skin, eyes and mouth turning yellow. This is also known as “jaundice”, it is a common symptom because of how rapidly sickle cells die, and the liver can not keep up with getting rid of them. This is what causes the yellow color visible on skin. There are many different treatments for the sickle cell disease but that is all determined by your physician. University of Maryland. (08, January 30). Sickle cell diease [Web log message]. Retrieved from []
 * Compared to a normal hemoglobin cell, which live to be around 120 days old, a sickle cells life span is around 10 - 20 days.
 * Generally people with sickle cell disease do not show any symptoms.
 * Most commonly affected by this disease are the African descent and Hispanics of Caribbean ancestry, scientists have also been finding this disease in many other humans across the world.
 * Approximately 72.000 people in the US have been affected by sickle cell disease.

Shark skin is very interesting and is not what many people would think of. If you were to stroke a shark from head to tail they seem very smooth, but switch direction and the so called smooth skin is actual tiny teeth better known as “Dermal Denticles” they can be very sharp, or coarse feeling. The name denticles come up because inside of the dermal denticles there are layers of //apatite// also found in any tooth. Dermal denticles are so small, but they are tested to be just as strong as steel. All of these denticles covering a sharks body gives them protect from great and small predators.

Different types of sharks have different patterns and shapes of dermal denticles. For example the great whites are shaped as horseshoes, and then there is the Basking Shark which has denticles that go in every which way direction. There as been many studies on these animals and humans have now started to use the same texture and build of shark skin to put on the bottom half of there boats, making the machines travel faster and more efficient on fuel.

Martin, A. M. (03, january 01). Skin of the teeth [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

**Personal post #2 - Bruising**
Bruising also commonly called ‘contusion’, this is when blood vessels ( capillaries) break and bleed into the tissue of the skin and other parts of the body.

One of the most common bruising would be Contusion this is where you will most likely see a large/small bump on the specific area that has taking some sort of hit. Since they are caused by blunt force injuries they are very prone to swelling. This is what causes the bump to develop under the skin.

There are many people who can develop a bruise much easier then others. It is common in most women and when many people start to age. Just a gentile hit may cause a serious bruise. Reasons being that your blood vessels do age; as they get older they also weaken. In older women it is a big factor that your skin is very likely to thin out, which is making it weak and not able to withstand so much force. Because of thin skin the blood vessels are closer to the surface, making it easier for them to break. This is not as common in older men.

McDonough, B. (2011, march 14).

Bruising- [Web log message].

Retrieved from []

Mayo clinic, M. C. (2011, may 26).

Easy bruising [Web log message].

Retrieved from []

Personal post #3 - Tapeworms
There are so many people (mostly women) who think of them selves as to big or fat and try very hard at eating healthy and exercising to take good care of their bodies, then there are others who say oh well maybe I can just cheat and lose weight fast by ingesting a parasite into my body so it can attach to my intestine and consume all the food I eat then it can grow nice and long….. Does that sound healthy to you at all? :S You may have heard of the tapeworm diet, and I figured I should share my feelings about it. I always think about how hard we are one our selves, when we look at our selves and think we all have to be perfect. No one it perfect!! I`m really not sure how this sounds to you guys but if you are looking at a person who in your eyes you think is “perfect” with their skinny body, and you guys are chatting away when they casually say oh yeah I have this parasite that is growing in my body, I ate a tapeworm a few months back;) …. Is that supposed to be attractive?? Not in my eyes. Ingesting a tapeworm can be very dangerous and you are doing a lot of harm to your body. Tapeworms are parasites that live in the intestine of animals; they can also easily affect humans. Humans can easily consume this parasite by eating raw or undercooked meats, there are also freshwater fish that may carry tapeworm cysts in their body and that can easily be transferred over to our bodies. “Tapeworms infection” will not cause death at the first of the process but is very capable of doing so, that would depend on how fast it were to grow, how many eggs it produces and if those eggs embed themselves into the intestine. The most common tapeworm would be one of the pork tapeworms such as the Taenia solium or a beef tapeworm; they are capable of growing between 15-30 feet in length. Most people who carried/carrying a tapeworm may feel pain in the abdominal area, diarrhea and you will not look forward to eating any meals anytime soon! If you have ingested a cyst it is possible that you have major headaches, they commonly cause seizures aswell. To learn more about this and where some of these tapeworms come from, check out the Tyra video J

Part 1 []

Part 2 []

Pearson, R. D. P. (2007, March). Tapeworm infection [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

HWK post #2 – Bird Flu
The virus //Bird Flu// has not yet spread to a large population of humans, but is capable of doing so and is very serious, most likely causing death. The //bird flu// was first found during the 1990s in Hong Kong. The virus is extremely contagious and affected many birds; the virus is carried in the saliva of the birds and their droppings. It will pick up on anything it comes in contact with. The virus its self was created by influenza, and rapidly spread. There were close to 1000 humans affected and thousands of birds were lost during the first outbreak because we did not have a cure. They have now built a functioning vaccine for this specific virus and contained yet another outbreak in 2002, slaughtering many birds that carried the //bird flu// to prevent it from affecting humans. Early 2011 a new batch of the virus developed, they have found out that it is a new type of Bird virus, so the vaccines are not killing it off.

Nettlemen, M. N. (2011, october 13). Bird fule [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

Personal post # 4 – Horses Hooves
I just had to do a post on my horse things, I really couldn’t help myself! The other day one of my friends was fascinated b y this animal and asked me, how they can function so much with such big bodies put on these little legs and small feet, so I thought... Wiki post!

The outside of a horses hoof is made up of the same fibers as your fingernails, just a bit tougher. They also grow just like human nails, and need to me trimmed or “clipped” when they grow to long. Many people who are competing their horses commonly put “shoes” under the horses feet, this is preventing the bottom of the foot to be tender and sore, it is the same thing as you guys and how you would rather wear shoes when walking across rocks. There are many problems a horse can develop from their hooves; such has Thrush, Founder, and Laminitis etc. There are too many issues to talk about and I could go on forever about them all, but I am going to focus in on //foundering// because it is one of the most painful to the horse. There are many different bones in the lower leg of the horse, and right about the foot you will find to “fetlock” from the fetlock down there is what you call a fetlock joint, long pastern bone, pastern joint, Short pastern, navicular bone, coffin joint, and then the actually bone in the hoof would be your coffin bone.

Now foundering is when your horse develops tissue damage in the foot because there is so much inflammation in the hooves. If there are serious cases of this then the wall of the hoof will eventually break down and become very weak, and then causing the horse to put all pressure on the coffin bone inside of the hoof, at this point your horse most likely will have permanent damage. The hoof wall will get to a point where it can not hold the weight and then the actually coffin bone will push out through the bottom of the horses foot and all the pressure will rest on these bones, at this point the horse would be in so much pain it would not be able to stand on its own feet.. If the horse has made it this far the common fix would be to euthanize the animal. This process is very painful to watch but it can also be easily prevented. Foundering can be caused by many things such as, the horse feeding on to much healthy growing grass, feeding on to much protein in their food, being continuously worked on hard ground, and is a possibility of happening if the horse is extremely stressed. These are easy thing that the owners are able to prevent from happening.

Biomedica Laboratories, I. (2006, march 11). Laminitis and founder [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

**Personal post #5 – Tears**
I always wonder why we have tears when we cry; well our eyes have tiny “tear ducts”. Tear Ducts acted as a protector for your eyes, they create tears to keep a moist layer over your eyes, also if the eye becomes irritated the tears will build up to remove anything that does not belong. There is also what we call “emotional tears” which you can see when someone is in physical pain or sadness. Studies have shown that when you have emotional tears, they produce more manganese (an element in the body that affects the temperament of a person) in the liquid. They also know that releasing this element out of the body is a stress reliever, most “criers” feel better afterwards. Many studies have shown that we produce tears because of the stress build up in our brains, causing many chemical reactions, when the tears come it is a way of releasing all these chemicals and hormones that we do not need, this is what makes you feel less stressed.



Driscoll, E. D. (2006, october 23). Why do people cry? [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

**HWK Post # 3-What do you think about stem cell research?**
I have very strong opinions on the research of embryonic stem cells. Personally, I am all for the research and have stronger opinions on some methods than others, such as using embryonic stem cells from discarded embryos from IVF clinics. This obviously has to be controlled in some ways. Workers should never have to put all of these stem cells to waste when they are perfectly good for research as they are not ever going to be used for anything else. Also take in the fact that if we had the satisfaction of the use of embryonic stem cells that have been discarded from IVF clinics, we would not have to argue over the therapeutic and reproductive cloning for embryonic stem cells because we would have more stems cells to work with in the first place.



Now if you ask me I am fine with both ways of cloning for creating the stem cells, I can understand how many are against the “therapeutic cloning” seeing how this does take away from life in general, but reproductive cloning is a very positive way of creating these stem cells. I also support IVF clinics that create stem cells solely for research. In my eyes, the more research that can be done, the more knowledge we will gather, and the more chance we have at finding a cure for thousands of diseases that we cannot do anything about at this moment in life.

Mishra, A. M. (Photographer) (2010). //Bloodcure:embryonic stem cell// [Web]. Retrieved from []

**Personal post #6 – Color Blindness**
Yesterday my dad and I had a ten minute argument about the color of my shirt, I knew for a fact that it was dark purple but he insisted it was blue; it ended with us both agreeing that he was colorblind J So why not share. Color blindness occurs when we have difficulty seein certain colors, this starts in certain nerves in cells called “cones” which are located in the retina. Depending on the damaged nerve you could have trouble seeing a difference in colors or get two colors mixed up with one another, such as you may not be able to tell the difference between the colors Red and Orange. If you have trouble identifying the two, studies have shown that majority will also have trouble telling the difference in other colors. The worst case of color blindness would be “Achromatopsia” this is when your eyes do not pick up on any colors, you see everything in shades of grey, and this condition is extremely rare. Achromatopsia creates very poor vision.

The common cause for color blindness is genetics which is carried through to the next generation. Scientists have done research that has shown that 1 in 10 men have at least one form of color blindness and very few women are diagnosed with it. They do not have a treatment for this that is known of, but people have tried a certain type of eye contact that helped them tell the difference between two similar colors.

Inc, A. D. A. M. (2011, June 1). Color blindness [Web log message]. Retrieved from []

Personal post # 7- Black Widow spiders
I know the majority reading probably hates or strongly dislikes spiders but these guys are super interesting!!

The Black widow spiders are identified by the extremely unique shape of an hour-glass and coloring on their stomach area. The common sizes of these spiders are 1.5 inches long (38mm), and 0.25 inches wide (6.4mm), but the male spiders weigh up to 30 xs less than a female. Black widow spiders do not mean harm but bites of these tiny insects are one of the most feared. Studies have shown that black widow spiders are the most venomous spiders in North America, there venom is said to be 15 times stronger than any rattlesnakes.

Geographic, N. G. (2011, january 01 ). //Black widow spiders//. Retrieved from []

When a human comes in counter with one of these spider bites it can cause death but there have not been many of these cases, it is quite rare. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Symptoms start with muscle pains, nausea, and also affect your breathing pathways. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">You will see that the bites can be fatal to small, young children, and the elderly. <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Humans are not to worry for that they only bite as a defence mechanism.

<span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">The most at risk would insects and male Black widow spider. After the Black widows <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">mate the female spider will commonly eat the males. (Weird huh?!) The females become <span style="font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">very violent during this “mating ritual.”

The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of all oceans, this so called “trench” is located in the western Pacific Ocean, to the east of the Mariana Islands. The trench is said to be 2,550 kilometres long. If you were to place Mount Everest (the worlds highest mountain) in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench(Challenger Deep) it would still be 2,060 meters from the surface of the water.

Exploring this enviroment is giving answer to many different things, researches and biolgists are discovering brand new species that have never been heard of before. This part of the ocean is a home to thousands of different species of invertebrates and fish.

As you may have guessed the bottom of the ocean has a very cold temperature and in the Mariana trench it is an extremly low temerature, but studies have found that there are vents all throughout the bottom of the trench, the vents are formed by hydrogen sulfide and other minerals being released into the water, as these substances are being released it creates very hot temperatures. If close to the vents the temperature can reach up to 300 degrees celsius, and the fluid that is released is highly acidic. Since there are such extrem differences in temperature from the vents and the deep ocean water which would be well below freezing, there are only few creatures that can adapte to this kind of enviroment such as the “Vent Crab”



WebMaster, M. T. (2003, may 10). //The mariana trench//. Retrieved from []


 * 1) The starting character in this novel is Charles Monet who picks up a deadly virus while traveling, the virus is later said to be Ebola which had some very unpleasant effects on him such as extremely bad headaches, backaches, upset stomach and his eyes turned abnormally red. Monet then take a plane to Nairobi hospital, to get medical attention, while flying to this destination he become extremely sick, vomiting blood mixed with black substances this process is known as black vomit (vomito negro). Monet soon arrives to the hospital and is awaits patiently in the waiting room, his body and immune system then crashes and he bleeds out. During this time Dr.Musoke is by Monet’s side trying to save his life. Days after Monet’s death Dr.Musoke realized that he must have coughed the/a virus while trying to save the life of Charles Monet. Dr.Musoke because very ill but his body fought the virus and he survived. The book then goes into great explanations about the Ebola virus and stories such as the first one to describe what it is capable of doing. [[image:http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/18/preston.jpg width="370" height="337" caption="Richard Preston author of The Hot Zone "]]

A “whoa” moment that stood out to me in the first part of this book would be when Nancy Jaax, an important character in this novel first made her way into biosafety level 4. She had the confidence and talent to do the research on the monkeys that had been infected by the deadly viruses. When reading you almost had a feeling that something bad was going to happen, the description in this part of the novel was very well written and I could not put the book down, imagining how nerve racking it would be to work in that environment and dissect the monkeys to research the lethal viruses they may be carrying! Sure enough there was a hole in her glove. The authors way of describing this was very well done, as I was feeling stressed out while reading, not knowing if she was going to be infected with the deadly virus or not until she went through the long process of undressing and decontaminating herself before being able to exit the levels.

Moon, B. M. (Photographer). (2008). //ideacity:richard preston//. [Print Photo]. Retrieved from []

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">Part 2 had a man with the name Dan Dalgard who loved researching on the monkeys, he soon realized in the novel that the monkey were rapidly dying off from something he could not place his finger on. They suspected it to be SFH and/or a virus but nothing to serious. Dalgard did not settle for that answer and kept observing extremely closely, he was right in the end because only few days’ later monkeys that were located in a different room were coming down with the sickness, becoming very ill and rapidly dying. Once sending this information. Also during this part of the book the Jaax family was going through a lot of family trouble. A lab tech with the name Tomas Geisbert soon discovers that it is not just SFH that they are dealing with but a deadly virus. Once many tests on these monkeys were done the death causing virus was known as Ebola Zairehard family troubles.

<span style="font-family: 'calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">A surprise to me during this part was how deadly this virus really is and how quickly it kills. I was surprised that Dan enjoyed working with the lethal viruses when he got the chance. I just could not understand how that could be enjoyable and how he would feel so comfortable doing this kind of work.

I was talking to my aunt in Turks and Caicos the other day and she had her hand full with the dogs she cares for, when I called she told me that they were treating a dog that had been infected by ticks and at that time she did not think he was going to make it because the dog had already been attacked by diseases. This surprised me because I did not know that they we capable of spreading so many diseases, so I figured why not make a wiki post about it J

You will commonly find ticks in warm areas around the world, they are known as Ectoparasites which means an external parasite. They live off the blood of mammals, birds and occasionally reptiles of some sort; once the animal has picked up this parasite it inserts its mouth and commonly produces a thick sticky substance that helps them stay attached. When a tick is being removed from the animal you must make sure not to squeeze the ticks body because you could possibly cause them to inject a disease into the animal’s body you also need to make sure that when it is being pulled out that the mouth comes along with it, if it is to stay in the skin it will cause infections.

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">Ticks are vectors for many diseases such as Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Tularemia, Tick-bone relapsing fever, Babesiosis, Ehrlichiosis, Tick paralysis, Tick-borne meningiencephalitis, and Bovine anaplasmosis, Etc.. <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 15px;">Fun Fact: Ticks can also attach and feed on the human body, also causing the same disease to humans as it can to the other animals.

Bayer Inc. (2010). //Ticks- bayer parasite solution//. Retrieved from []

It is crazy to think of how much skin a person is likely to lose in a years’ time. I don’t think we realize how much skin we do shed from day to day. In the run of a day the average person will shed up to 600,000 skin particles. But us shedding is much different than a snake for instants, snakes shed their full skin quite frequently, many times throughout a year and it is very obvious when this happens, where as when we lose our skin no one notices. Also with horses or dogs, it is easy to see that when in a colder climate they grow undercoat, or thicker fur then as the days get longer and warmer they well “blowout their coat” which is when they shed all of the hair that is not need, giving them their new summer coats. During the run of a year at the rate of 600,000 particle of skin a day the human loses about 1.5lbs and capable of loses up to 8lbs of skin a year, so by the age of 70 the average person will have shed approximately 105lbs of skin. We do this much different than most animals, human bodies are constantly forming new skin particles, once they are formed they push up from the bottom, as they make their way to the top the outside layer then becomes dead and weathered from the environments we live in, so when the new layer makes it to the top the ``dead layer`` is in the process of falling off. Giving room for the new skin particles to surface, this is a continuous process.

Grabianowski, E. G. (2010, May 27). //Discovery health " shed skin cells"//. Retrieved from []

1. A will fitted team who knows how to deal with deadly viruses were sent out to take care of the monkey house situation. They planned to keep this case on the DL and out of the public, they also tried to stay out of sight as much as possible, this was a hard task seeing how the word had spread and many people knew something wasn’t right in that building. They soon made the plan to kill all of the monkeys; they went through many steps doing so. First starting by ejecting them with an anaesthetic shot, then giving them a needle that puts them to sleep. The monkeys would then be cut open by members of the team and they would take samples of what they needed to look at. Once all monkeys were dead and disposed they brought in a cleaning team, they scrubbed every inch of the building with bleach making sure not to miss a spot. After covering all surfaces with bleach they brought in a very strong gas and filled the building with it, making sure to kill off the entire virus, saying that there was a zero chance that is could be living anymore. Everyone made it out safe and sound.

2. What surprised me in this part of the book wasn’t anything exciting but, it caught me off guard when they cleaned out the monkey house because all they did was bleach it and then filled it with gas, yes I know that is was deadly and the gas is suppose to kill absolutely everything but to me the clean up just seemed too simple, I figured they would do a lot more to be sure that all was good.



**HWK Post #6 – Part 4 the Hot Zone**
The fourth part of the book Richard Preston travels to Africa to investigate the Kitum Cave. Richard got on the topic of AIDS seeing how when they were traveling on the Kinshasa Highway part of it was called the Aids Highway. When they arrived to the cave Richard dressed in a level 4 suit for protection from anything that may be in the cave. Once he was down in the cave Richard found many animal tracks. So he assumes that one of the species is the carrier of the virus. He thought that it was a perfect environment for any virus to be in seeing how it was very dry and there was no sunlight. Near the end Richard stops in at the Reston monkey house were the disease was first found. Everything seemed to be abandoned, he then finished the book by saying that the disease will be back someday.

**Spin Off**
Something that I find pretty crazy is that there are many viruses and diseases that we don`t know about and we never will, there could be the most deadly virus that is formed and humans may never come in contact with it so it will never be discovered which is crazy to think about! It is also crazy to think about how many viruses people keep under control. Just thinking about every single virus traveling to people across the world and the impact that would have on us is scary. We don`t even get involved with half of the viruses on the planet! It is sad that people in third world countries are more prone to picking up viruses and diseases simply because they do not have the vaccinations that we in our country.

Figured I would do my last personal post on something I can ramble on about J

Many of you may not know but horses are not able to vomit, their bodies don’t work in that way, and that is when theses animals can run into a lot of trouble. One of the most common problems we see in horses is colic and this is like having a “belly ache” you could say. When a horse is having abdominal pains it is like us having pain in our stomach whether it be from over eating, eating something that did not settle well with the body and also just having muscle pains, but we mostly see gastrointestinal forms of colic in horses.

The way their bodies are built it is very easy for them to have impactions. Unfortunately at times it can be very difficult for us to help them. When a horse has minor colic you will typically see veterinarians put a tube up the horses’ nose and down through the oesophagus and literally pump oil into their bodies to get everything “flowing” again.

If there is a serious case of colic it commonly cannot be fixed, unless the horse is put through surgery and at that they still have a slim chance of survival. When horses have bad pain, they commonly thrash and/or have the urge to roll to get rid of it, but if this happens it is possible for the intestines to twist and after that happens there is not much you can do for the animal.

Knowing how to tell if your horse may be colicing is very important. Common signs would be:
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Irregular sweating
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Become very restless
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Constant pawing at the ground
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Lay down and get up several times
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Bite at his/her sides
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Kick at his/her belly
 * <span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; font-size: 14px;">Change in manure/no manure