Biology Reflections

Before Alka Menon's lecture "Trust Issues: AI, Medicine, and Modern Life," we were asked to read two pieces. On the surface they cover different ground. One is about AI creeping into mental healthcare, the other about how we measure public trust in science. But reading them back to back, I realized they are asking the same question from opposite ends: who actually decides what counts as trustworthy, and how do we even know when trust is there? The first reading, Mira Vale's "

I took AP Biology as a course and APES self-taught myself out of a textbook. Therefore, I noticed something about second-time around students that they may have missed – that a large portion of what I was supposed to be learning in APES, I had actually already learned in Bio. More specifically, AP Bio Units 7 & 8 (Natural Selection/ Ecology) are a huge part of APES. The first unit is Unit 8 – Ecology. This unit discusses the flow of energy in trophic levels, which includes th

A personal Synopsys For a class assignment at Brown Precollege, I put together a dramatic synopsis about one of the most infamous viruses in history: the 1918 influenza strain. Scientists recently reconstructed it using reverse genetics, which sounds like something ripped straight from a zombie movie, but the purpose was serious. By rebuilding all eight of the virus’s gene segments, researchers were finally able to test what made the 1918 strain so virulent. Here is the link

The “Spongivirus”: Charming Little Menace Every now and then, a class project produces a virus so weirdly creative you almost want to root for it. The Spongivirus (officially D. spongiae Variant-1) is exactly that. Picture a virus with a sponge-like outer shell full of tiny pores and a yellow protective core inside. It’s basically the kitchen sponge of the microscopic world, just… a lot less helpful ` This thing runs on RNA, which means it mutates fast and never sits still.