Category: Research

For a school assignment a little while back, I did an emotional analysis on the origin of “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” later put to music as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This is one of those topics in American history I remember sort of hearing about, but up until I did this short essay, I didn’t have many of the details, and so since I presume that’s the standard experience, I thought it would be neat to share my analysis.

It’s unsurprising that Francis Scott Key had such a passionate emotional response to the sight of the American flag still flying after the Battle of Baltimore, for many reasons. First is the simple fact that Mr. Key was a patriot. He may have been opposed to the war, but more than that, he was outraged by the British’s actions, including the injustice that had brought him to Baltimore in the first place: the arrest of a physician, William Beanes, for having the courage to stand up to British soldiers who had been plundering his home. Mr. Key, a lawyer, was there to negotiate for Mr. Beanes’s release. By the time he had succeeded in his venture, however, he had learned of the imminent attack on Fort McHenry and was therefore withheld from returning to shore until after the battle’s conclusion. This means that not only was Key witness to the bombardment, he knew that it was coming and was helpless to stop it.

This helplessness would have been bad enough as it persisted through the daylight hours of the attack, Key watching from afar as “it seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting shot and shell in a sheet of fire and brimstone,” but even worse as the battle carried into the night, and he had only red in the sky and the sound of “bombs bursting in air” as evidence that the fighting carried on, with no way to see the damage or which side the tides of war were favoring. It seemed inevitable to him that given the scale of the attack, the British would overtake the fort, and yet Key had not even the comfort of knowing whether that was so. I can only imagine the overwhelming relief he must have felt when dawn broke, and rather than the British Union Jack that Key feared he would see, the American flag still flew over Fort McHenry. It was, in his words, “a most merciful deliverance,” and from that raw emotion of relief and pride, “The Defense of Fort McHenry” was written.

Exactly what it says on the packaging.

Over the course of history, humans have continually and repeatedly manipulated the reproduction of organisms to manifest select traits of preference. This is known as artificial selection. Because at the time, farmers weren’t aware of genes and alleles, farmers selected based on phenotype, rather than genotype. Once they had chosen a trait they wanted to see prevalent in their livestock population, they isolated the organisms already expressing it to breed amongst themselves. By doing so for multiple generations, they ensured the organisms were “purebred,” or solely carrying the selected characteristics.

Since this selection isn’t natural, the target traits aren’t necessarily advantageous to survival, or useful at all, as can be seen with pigeon breeding, a popular hobby in England in Darwin’s time. In that case, they were selecting for size, shape of beak, color, and other such trivialities.

In contrast, plants like kale were selected for more defining traits, in this case the large leaves. Kale, like cabbage, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cauliflower, was developed via artificial selection from wild mustard. Interestingly, though these are all drastically varying vegetables, and many of them are likely not mentally associated with each other, they’re all of the same species: Brassica oleracea.

This is because in artificial selection, the traits selective breeding is based on are all present within one species. This in itself seems obvious, since it’s a requirement of creating viable and reproducing offspring. However, in this case it means that even generations later, the results are manifestations of different alleles, not different genes, and as such their descendants are still of the same species. Furthermore, especially since farmers had no knowledge of alleles, but rather were choosing based on what they saw, they were selecting for many traits at a time, hence the drastic differences between resulting offspring.

No, not relationships, and definitely not James. Today I’m discussing chemical bonds. Why? Well, they’re pretty interesting, kind of important, and I’m still Done™ with the world at large, so I figured I’d focus on the world at very, very small instead.

Covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonds are all prevalent in biology. For instance, without ionic bonds, the ions like sodium and potassium necessary for the body’s electrical impulses — which allow the nervous system to function — wouldn’t be stable, or able to dissolve. That dissolution is also owed to hydrogen bonds, which are most commonly seen in water. Because water is a polar molecule, its positively-charged hydrogen atoms are attracted to electronegative atoms, such as the chloride in salt. However, because the bond between hydrogens and oxygens in water molecules is a covalent bond, which is stronger than an ionic bond, the water stays intact and the ionic bond is broken, stopping its ions from neutralizing each others’ charges and therefore enabling the previously mentioned electrical impulses. These are only a few examples of bond types and their functions, but as I’ve illustrated, they’re imperative to human function.

So, I had to illustrate the cell cycle recently. Which, you know, Bio assignment, okay. Happens. But it wasn’t until I was ranting about it updating Mom on my progress that I realized a lot of people who haven’t covered it as recently probably don’t remember how it works. Because, let’s face it, that’s what happens with most of what we learn in school. Also, there’s plenty of diagrams for mitosis out there, but not enough covering the whole cycle, with interphase. So, because a quick refresher is good, and also because I put a lot of effort into making this legible when photographed and want to show off a little, here’s this handy model of the cell cycle.

In February of 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military personnel under the authority of Lieutenant General John DeWitt to relocate individuals of Japanese descent from their homes on the West Coast. The ensuing incarceration of American civilians stands as a shameful mark upon our history, both in concept and in execution.

I’ll start with the obvious — America is supposed to be a place of freedom. We have civil liberties and our supposedly inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the Army was permitted to round up innocents and send them to isolated camps in poor climates for the then unknown duration of the war.

Were they? Innocents, I mean? Well, let’s see. According to Paul Kitagaki Jr., “Fewer than 3 percent of them might be inclined towards sabotage or spying… and the FBI already knew who most of those individuals were.” So yes, the vast majority of the over 100,000 people relocated were, in all probability, completely innocent. Furthermore, though people of Japanese descent were targeted, individuals with German and Italian ancestry were left alone, despite those nations also being our enemies at the time. This suggests that Japanese-Americans were picked out for reasons independent of the war, which is an implicitly racist approach, as can be seen in John DeWitt’s statement, “A Jap’s a Jap. They are a dangerous element, whether loyal or not,” and in the fact that his report leading to Executive Order 9066 was “filled with known falsehoods” (USHistory.org). Not only this, but the criteria for being “evacuated” was being at least 1/16 Japanese. That, for reference, means one of their great-great-grandparents was from Japan. In truth, most of the Nisei, Japanese-Americans born in the States, had never even been to the country they were suspected of holding hidden loyalties to. As Supreme Court Justice Murphy said, “…racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people.” 

If this wasn’t bad enough, the details of the relocation proved equally detestable. For starters, the evacuees were given only a week’s notice, and instructions to bring only what they could carry. For most, this meant that their homes, their stores, and the majority of their possessions were lost, sold in a hurry and “often for pennies on the dollar.” (Library of Congress.)

After that, they were kept in “assembly centers” while the more permanent “relocation centers” were built. Assembly centers were usually fairgrounds or racetracks, not meant for human habitation, and the internees instead had to sleep in sheds meant for livestock. According to History.com, the Santa Anita Assembly Center “…was a de-facto city with 18,000 interred, 8,500 of whom lived in stables.” It goes on to state that, along with the poor housing conditions and the close quarters the civilians were forced into, the sanitation in most of the camps was also substandard and not enough food was provided. In essence, not only were their rights as American citizens systematically stripped away, but they were treated more like cattle than as people.

The relocation camps were better, but they were by no means good. There were ten permanent housing camps, two of which were on Native American reservations — despite the protests of tribal councils — and all of which were chosen for their remote locations. The climates were harsh, and, though the government hoped to make the camps somewhat self-sufficient, their choice of location meant arid soil that was less than ideal for farming.

Families, usually four or five to a building, were housed in tarpaper barracks without running water. They ate in communal mess halls, usually eating “mass produced army-style grub,” (USHistory.com) and used shared restroom facilities. While the internees were provided with education for the children and jobs for the adults, there was an ever-present reminder of their incarcerated status in the armed guards, watchtowers, and barbed wire keeping them there.

As time passed, added insulation to the barracks and a growing cultural flavor within the camps, each its own small town, made the incarceration more comfortable. At the same time, however, due to the forced and limited nature of their new communities, significant parts of the Japanese-American culture were lost.

In the informal social structuring of the camps, children played for hours unsupervised and often ate with their friends rather than their families. This directly undermined the traditional Japanese emphasis on close bonds and respect for elders. Also, as a Library of Congress article states, since jobs were only given to U.S. citizens, “The younger generation, as the breadwinners, soon began to take on leadership roles in the internee community, while the Issei, who had worked for decades to build up businesses and lead their families, found themselves sidelined.”

That was only one of the lasting impacts of the relocation. Despite the highly decorated, all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and their contribution to the war effort, Japanese-Americans were met with prejudice and hostility when they tried to return home after the war. Because of this, not only had they lost their property, but many were forced to permanently relocate from their towns of residence, and quite possibly from the West Coast altogether.

In 1988, Congress issued a formal apology and provided $20,000 to each surviving individual who had been interned. While it’s good that the harm the government caused was recognized and reparations were paid, the fact that it took 40 years for them to do so is infuriating, and perhaps as condemnable as the ordeal itself. After all, it’s one thing to wrong someone, and another completely to then refuse to acknowledge it or make amends.

The relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II was a continuous series of injustices, and though we have recovered as a nation, it stands as both a setback in the progression of American civil liberties, and a permanent blemish in our history.

This is, admittedly, more scientific and probably also shorter than my posts usually are, but I’ve been busy, so this fun micro-essay for AP Biology is what I decided to post this week. I hope that, at the very least, this encourages you to look further into the various theories and system processes in biology; it’s actually quite interesting.

The Theory of Natural Selection states, in priniciple, that the organisms with traits that are advantageous in their environments will be the ones that survive to produce offspring, or to produce more offspring than their competition, passing on the desirable trait. According to Endosymiotic Theory, eukaryotes were formed when a larger organism engulfed a mitochondria and/or a cholorplast, and, finding that it produced energy, kept it.

This, of course, makes perfect sense in explaining why eukaryotes rose in the evolutionary ladder. Where many organisms would still have been respirating anaerobically, producing only 2 ATP (adenine triphosphate) per respiratory cycle, the newly formed eukaryotes, with their mitochondria, would have been able to partake in aerobic respiration, which can produce up to 38 ATP per cycle.

With the increased efficiency of energy production, and the initial lack of competition over the oxygen necessary for aerobic respiration, the eukaryotic organisms would have had a massive advantage over their mitochondria-less counterparts, increasing their likelihood of reproduction to pass the trait on.

To reiterate, the acquisition of a mitochondria, and with it, cellular respiration, would dramatically increase an organism’s efficiency of energy intake, giving it a distinctive evolutionary advantage over other primordial life forms.

The period from the 1860’s to 1900, also known as “the Gilded Age,” was a time wrought with conflict between business owners and their workers. At this point in time, there were not yet many government regulations of industry, leaving business owners to do as they please. With dangerous working conditions, long hours and low wages, the workers stepped in–or rather, out–to demand change, and they were right to do so.

There is a saying that regulations are written in blood, and the Gilded Age is most likely where that originated from. According to Khan Academy, “Between 1881 and 1900, 35,000 workers per year lost their lives in industrial and other accidents at work.” This is because, without anyone standing up to them, the business owners could do whatever they liked, and they cared a good deal more about production and lining their own pockets (and houses — the History.com article has some incredible examples) with money than they did about the people they were exploiting, and killing, to do that.

It was during this time period that many unions, like the Knights of Labor, were formed, and strikes became a more common occurrence. Two notable such strikes were the Homestead Strike at Homestead Steelworks, where a gunfight broke out between striking workers and the “strikebreakers” brought in to forcibly reopen the steelworks, and the Pullman Strike, in which railroad workers nationwide refused to move trains in protest of wage cuts without proportionate rent cuts in Pullman’s company town outside Chicago. In both cases government troops, in the former case state and in the latter, federal, were dispatched to end the strikes.

Not much progress was made during the Gilded Age. Management would crack down on the workers who dared to speak out, and when the government did get involved they consistently sided with the businesses over the workers. While some rights were won, those were on a business-by-business basis, rather than government regulations protecting the rights of the people. As a whole, little was accomplished for workers’ rights during this time. However, these strikes and the continued expression of discontent would pave the road for labor laws and industrial regulation in the future, providing us with the much safer working conditions we have today.

The “Dust Bowl” is a term used both to describe the drought and dust storms of the 1930’s, and the Great Plains area in which it occurred. While the drought itself was an unavoidable natural disaster, its effects were greatly exacerbated by human activities, namely irresponsible agricultural practices.

    This is clear in the Dust Bowl’s conditions. After all, as awful as a decade-long series of droughts and high winds might be, it doesn’t account for the “black blizzards,” as they were called, storms that picked up Great Plains topsoil and carried it as far as New York. Dust storms, it’s true, were and are a thing, but never to this magnitude. That’s because, among other things, there’s just not enough loose topsoil to throw around. It’s estimated that as many as three million tons of topsoil blew off of the Great Plains during the infamous “Black Sunday” storm, and that was only one occurence.

    So why was there so much topsoil? That’s where human error and farming practices come into play. You see, one of the benefits of the native grasses that grew in the Plains is that they had deep roots that held the soil in place. But when settlers came and cultivated the land, they dug up those grasses in favor of other crops, like wheat. Increased demand for those other crops during World War I encouraged farmers to plow more land that had once been grassland, so that they could plant more, and when the prices for the crops they now had surpluses of dropped again, they plowed even more so that they could plant enough to make a profit. As a result, when the droughts hit and the crops died, there were no native grasses to stop the soil from blowing away.

    At some point, all of the best farmland was in use, and when the farmers kept on cultivating land, they had to move to poorer growing space. Unfortunately, “farming submarginal lands often had negative results, such as soil erosion and nutrient leaching.” (National Drought Mitigation Center) Other practices, such as using the new one-way disc plow, which increased the risk of blowing soil, and the abandonment of soil conservation measures in the interest of saving time and money, also greatly contributed to the environmental damage done prior to the droughts of the Dust Bowl. This damage, in turn, provided the means — that is to say, the dry, nutrient-depleted, loose dirt in abundance — for the catastrophic effects of what would otherwise have been little more than a severe dry spell.