Effortness > Brainage

Tomorrow is my last day of classes before finals week (at WMU; KVCC's semester is a week longer).  So, another semester is coming to an end which brings me one step closer to getting my degree.  It's taken me a really long time to be in school.  I don't just mean attending classes and finishing the semester.  I mean going and listening and reading and learning.  And it has been awesome.  I love it.  As stressful as it can be with taking care of the little tyke and working very part-time, it is all worth it.  It's really fulfilling to be learning about things I am genuinely excited about and working toward a real goal.  Another thing I've come to realize over this semester is that 90% of a good grade is the effort you put into it.  It is much less intellectual ability and more the amount of time you devote to learning.  Now, there are obviously differences in mental capacities between one person and the next, but... if you really really try you are probably going to succeed. 

Additionally, Anna is amazing.  She is getting big and learning new words every day that have their own little- kid twist on them.  Adorable.  When she says words with the "-ck" noise she sounds like she's trying to get phlegm out of her throat.  "Cracker" is my favorite. And for some reason when she says "Rock", she says it like a whispering monster... with the phlegm clearing noise at the end to top it off.  Hi-larious.  She's also quite the acrobat.  She can climb out of her crib before I can blink.  Sort of like a ninja.  Soooo, I'm going to sign her up for gymnastics.  The girl already has no fear so I figure someone should at least teach her the proper techniques for diving head first toward the ground.  Safety first!

The non-fluffy animals in life

Right now I'm taking Organismal Biology and we have come across several really cool animals throughout the course.  One is a parasite, Cymothoa exigua, that eats the tongue of its fish host and then plays the role of the fish's tongue until it decides to leave, causing the fish's death.  I'm really unsure of the mechanism of the parasite acting as the tongue but once the parasite decides to live there, the fish has zero chance without it sticking around.  This other one I came across while doing research for one of my papers.  Elysia chlorotica is a sea slug that feeds on algae until it stores enough chloroplasts that it no longer needs to eat.  Because of the abundance of chloroplasts, the slug obtains energy from sunlight just like plants do.  So it's part animal/part plant/part really f-ing cool.

GFAJ-1: The arsenist has oddly shaped DNA

I'm going to start off my blog with this amazingness:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20024450-52.html 

A NASA fellow found a bacteria, GFAJ-1, in a California lake that contains high amounts of metals and salts.  Other microbes share the bacteria's ability to survive in such harsh environments and utilize the element arsenic as an energy source but the bacteria just discovered can use arsenic in place of  phosphorus (a necessary element to make DNA and therefore everything else in our bodies).  This is cool because it's unlike any other life form that we know.  It was already hard enough to define life and this just complicates things further.  It gives more hope (or fear?) that we will find life somewhere else beyond earth's atmosphere.

Disclaimer:  I am a huge dork.  I make lame jokes, such as the title of this post.  I also make up words sometimes.  Just go with it, okely schmokely?