Day 39: Bones and Dead People

So today we moved onto forensics. We looked at some cases and determined the cause of death and stuff like that. But to be quite honest, I was having too much fun with the bones…I am not ashamed. Although I think someone put something in my and Michelle's breakfast because we were bouncing off the walls.

Overall, a light hearted post talking about death. Yay!

Until next time.

Say hello to my friend.

Michelle was teaching her 3rd hand how to write

To be or not to be?  That is the question

Forensics Quiz (with a tribute to Sherlock season 3 episode 3)

Here's a link to a playlist of five 30 second videos that I thought of when I saw the quiz question. I highly suggest you watch it because: one, the cinematography is amazing. Two, Benedict Cumberbatch! And three, it relates to the quiz question! (mostly)

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQRfrVEGU-GPKyGg2zAKxcm6Tqhz8DEKG&feature=edit_ok

Question:
A twenty-year old man was found supine on Thompson Creek Trail with a bullet wound. The entrance of the wound was on the left lateral side 1 cm above the 3rd rib. The exit would was 5 cm above the belly button in the umbilical region. While tracing the bullet path, you notice at the entrance the bullet travels in the frontal plane with a 45-degree downward angle.  Upon inspection of the right side of the rib cage by x-ray, you observe that the 8th rib is fractured. Fragments of the bullets are then traced to the final exit wound. What is the leading differential diagnosis (and why) and what are three plausible alternatives and how would you rule them out?

Answers

1. Blood loss: Now, obviously we have a slightly different case than Sherlock did. Sherlock's bullet acted like a cork, blocking blood from flowing out of the body for the most part. Our man was shot from the side and his bullet didn't stay in his body. He had two holes in his body, which meant twice the blood loss. And since we're assuming he didn't have a mind palace like Sherlock, he probably wouldn't have been able to figure out which way he needed to fall to reduce the amount of blood loss. Not that it would him much good since he had two wounds.

If the cause of death wasn't blood loss, then there must have been some magic going on. There is going to be blood loss, but it might not be the case if something else killed him first.

2. Lung puncture: The bullet had fractured the 8th rib on the right side of the rib cage. With most bullets, fractured ribs mean that sharp parts of the rib stick out and poke other organs. One of them could have been a lung.

This could be disproven by checking to see if a lung was punctured and whether or not there was frothy blood saliva in the man's mouth when discovered.

3. Spleen ruptured/destroyed: The bullet entered the left lateral side angled down forty-five degrees. There is a chance that the bullet passed through the spleen.

If the spleen wasn't hit, then it wasn't the cause of death.


Another cause of death after the initial bullet wound and numbness sensation is hypovolemic shock, which is caused by lack of oxygen flowing in the blood. Either way, no matter where you get shot, hypovolemic shock is going to happen, unless you die instantly.

So that's that. Hope you liked the Sherlock clips. Go watch the show! It's really good.

Day 38: Movie Day!

We continued watching the movie and holy crap there's two of them!

And one of them is Scottish!

There was a lot of running and falling and fire and an obscene amount of airborne vehicles. Yeah, that's basically it. We're finishing up the movie next class!

Until next time.

Day 37: ScarJo and The Island (oh and something about stem cells)

Scarlett Johansson is an amazing actress, and this is relevant to my biology class because we're watching [dramatic pause] The Island.

So I'm not exactly sure what the movie is about yet, but we did see a scene where a human adult was born out of a giant artificial uterus bag thing. At let me tell you, it's nothing like actual birth. Believe me, my mom is a gynecologist. I know.

And there's something fruity going on with ScarJo and male protagonist, which is hilarious because the place where they live has this "proximity rule" thing where you cannot touch anyone, at all. Not even like a handshake or a high five. It's like middle school all over again.

So yeah, we're watching The Island in class as a transition to forensics (I think).

Tonight's homework was to read an article on stem cells and this thing called iPSC (induced pluripotent stem cells). A mouthful right? That's why they call it iPSC. Although, the abbreviations make it sound like an Apple product.

The iPSC is basically a stem cell which hasn't begun differentiation. That's when the stem cell becomes more specialized in one particular part of the body, like skin cells, or blood cells. Scientists want to use the iPSC to find cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Scientists are still testing the iPSC but they hope to be able to use it for treatment as soon as they know exactly what the cells are capable of.

Until next time.

Oops...Happy New Year? A brief summary of the first two weeks back (Day 32-36)

Me the first day back from winter break

Okay so I've been slacking on these posts, but in my defense I've only just gotten out of the winter break slump so you know, I've been out of it.

Day 32

TEST!!! That is all.

Day 33

First day back. Everyone was really tired. Don't really remember most of it to be quite honest. We were assigned a paper to write on about cancer.

Day 34

Cancer Unit! We learned about how cancer is formed, the types of cancer, etc. And then we worked on our paper.

Day 35

More Cancer!

Day 36

Last day of the cancer unit. Our papers were due. My paper was on the psychological effects of children with glioma (brain tumor) and their parents. So I got to comb through more than a hundred pages (I'm not exaggerating) of personal accounts from glioma patients. It was pretty depressing actually, but I got to read about families coming together to pull through the illness their child had and that was very inspiring.

But we're done with the cancer unit now!

Until next time (which will be in approximately half an hour because I've got to post today's blog post as well!)

Extra Credit!

aww!

I probably should have done this a long time ago.

So a while back, in December, this beautiful dog named Sugar had a litter of twelve puppies! I saw the pictures and I automatically thought about genetics.

















Apparently, so did my teacher because now it's an extra credit problem.

Here's the key for the genotypes

BB=black lab, no chocolate
Bb=black lab, chocolate carrier
bb=chocolate lab

Yellow Lab's fur color is controlled by a recessive epistatic gene, which "hides" the dominant dark fur gene.

EE=no yellow
Ee=yellow carrier but looks black or chocolate
ee=yellow Lab


So we can see that the mom is a yellow Lab and from the picture, we can tell that her genotype is eebb because her nose is not black. It's brown.

Since 5 out of 12 puppies were chocolate and 7 out of 12 puppies were black, we know that the father can not carry a recessive gene because then there would be a chance of one of the puppies being a yellow Lab. But the father would have to carry at least one little "b" in order for some of his offspring to be chocolate Labs. Therefore, the father's genotype is EEBb.

Below are Punnett squares with predicted genotypes of the offspring. It splits into half: one half being chocolate and the other half being black. This is close to the actual outcome.