Fun Facts About Life (Part 2)

I know you have been anxiously waiting for the second part of this fun facts about life series (I guess this is like the sequel huh). If you missed the first half called Fun Facts About Life (Part 1) well lets see if you can figure out what to do (I'm very helpful I know). Now if you are saying to yourself: "I don't really care about these facts" or "I have nothing to do and somehow I ended up here and I am going to read this post that seems pointless so I actually do something" or even "I haven't been waiting for this post at all..." well I kinda figure that's the case. Enjoy anyway.

If you're not already mad at me for telling you these amazing facts about us then I don't think I've given the book justice. Do you think your different? If you said yes, your wrong. Apparently modern humans, so us, have little genetic variability. Isn't that nice? Fifty five chimps have more diversity than the entire human population. Makes you feel really special doesn't it?

I should note that he did explain why this is. There was something about a really big rift that we haven't explored that might have the answers. I wasn't really paying that close attention.

Want to know the reason we don't know what a dodo looks like? Well that's because after the last dodo died the director of a museum thought the stuffed dodo they had was getting unpleasantly musty so he ordered it to be thrown in a bonfire. Poor dodo (what a funny name). A dodo was the largest member of the pigeon family, in case you were wondering.

One of the last big creatures to go extinct was Steller's sea cow:

 

The assumed look of Steller's sea cow.
http://animalsnomore.com/extinct-animal-Stellers_Sea_Cow.php

It is related to a dugong (that's a fun name too).

A dugong. Pretty cool looking, actually.
http://seapics.com/gallery/Mammalia/Sirenia/Dugongidae/dugong-search.html

 The Carolina parakeet is extinct. This is because whenever they were hunted the would fly up but once the shooting was done they would return to the same place to check on their fallen comrades. The last one died in a zoo and was stuffed...but the zoo lost it.

The Carolina parakeet. So pretty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Parakeet

So apparently for the longest time the people who really liked the world's living things were the ones that killed them. I really hope that isn't true anymore. I really like my cats. I really like cats in general and I really don't want them to go extinct because they are so cool (along with all the other animals out there, don't worry I'm not one of those people that likes one animal and doesn't care what happens to all the other ones.

Well I hope you enjoyed these facts. Maybe you actually learned something! I know I did, although I don't think I learned what my teacher intended for me to learn. Oh well at least I learned something rather than nothing.
~Scooby

Fun Facts About Life (Part 1)

Over the summer I had to read a book for AP Biology. It is called "A Short History of Nearly Everything." I was told to read this book by the teacher that originally was going to teach the class (the teacher told everyone to read it). Well when I got to school I had a totally different teacher and the new teacher never even mentioned this book. Sigh.

Now this book wasn't very encouraging and I found a lot of stuff that (when I really thought about) isn't very nice. So I thought I'd share my findings and thoughts with you.

The third paragraph of the first chapter says "Imagine if you can, which of course you can't..." Why would you tell me to imagine something if you already know that I can't? That just doesn't make sense. It's like saying, "Hey! Can you see that! Of course you can't because you're blind!" Rude.

Did you know we have the genes to grow a tail? Well now you do! The genes just aren't turned on if that makes sense. (I think this is the most exciting thing I learned from this book.)

Apparently a common newt is "more genetically splendorous than we are, by a factor of five." Doesn't that just make you feel so loved? Well don't worry about it because later on in the book it says that it's not how many genes you have, but what you do with the genes you have. So I guess we are smarter than the newt. Well let's hope anyway.

The Earth is not as stable as we thought it was apparently. Isn't that comforting? Apparently it goes violently between periods of hot and really cold. Good to know that we are living on a planet that can't decided if it's hot or cold.

Now the book is saying that ice ages might occur because of a rise in temperature. I don't know about you but that doesn't sound good to me. With global warming and what not I would say we are due for another ice age.

I realize this has nothing to do with this has very little to do with this
post but it's a good movie and you should see it.
http://reelauthors.com/blog/screenplay/ice-age-4/

For two chapters now it has been talking about our ancestors and I'm pretty sure I was daydreaming through the whole first chapter. However I'm now in the second chapter and apparently we know more about other hominids than we do about ourselves. The Google definition of hominid is: "A primate of a family (Hominidae) that includes humans and their fossil ancestors." So we know more about our ancestors (which according to this book we don't know much about them either) than we do about ourselves. Good to know...I guess.

That brings me to another problem with this book. While reading this I have realized that the term "We don't know much" appears on practically every page. So we are a smart species but we don't know much. That's nice.
~Scooby

P.S. You might have noticed the "part 1" in the title. Yes I do have more complaints about this book. But I thought I would spread it out so you don't get a mean science overload.

P.S.S. Should I be mean and wait a month to post the second part to this? You know kind of like suspense to make you come back and get impatient because you want to learn more about mean science that this book told me about? Well I guess we will see right?