Underwater volcanoes (or submarine volcanoes) can be found at convergent plate boundaries. A famous string of submarine volcanoes is called the ring of fire. This subduction zone surrounds a large part of the Pacific ocean, and when they erupt these volcanoes often form small islands that last for a brief amount of time. The tectonic plates push against each other and overlap, and magma is recycled and explodes out of the earth in the form of a volcano.
An expedition team with members from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration were observing the Pacific area near the islands of Tonga, Fiji and Samoa in May 2009. Under 4,000 feet of water, researchers were able to capture what is believed to be the deepest ocean eruption of all time. The eruption was southeast of Samoa.
This volcano stands over a mile off the ocean floor, and has the eruptive area of a football field.
Let’s say you have a twin who, at birth, was completely identical to you, same gender, appearance behaviour, and so on. Then, one day your parents decide to separate. You will go on to live with your mother, and your twin will live with your father. You were lucky and grew up living a normal, healthy life with access to education, friends and a loving environment. Your twin, on the other hand, didn’t get proper nutrition, lived in a rough area and even started smoking.
If you two met later in life, you’ll find that you two are no longer identical. In fact, you’re probably very different from each other, not just appearance wise, but genetically speaking as well. Your genomes would still be identical, but your epigenetics would be vastly different.
DNA is the set of characteristics and traits passed down from your parents that make you who you are. Your DNA is full of genes, but they aren’t all expressed at once. The epigenome instructs your DNA on what to do, but the epigenome doesn’t change your DNA. It merely decides how much and when some genes are expressed. All the cells in your body have a copy of your DNA in them, but they don’t necessarily know what to do with the DNA. Methyl groups are made from carbon and hydrogen and act as a set of instructions, telling the genome what to be. This is how cells know whether to be a skin cell, a brain cell or an organ. Methyl groups will bind to a gene and tell the gene how much it should express or what not to express. To compact the enormous amount of DNA we have into our cells, DNA wraps itself around the histones in chromatin form. How much the DNA can express is determined by how tightly the DNA is wound around the histone. Both histones and methyl groups impact your genes. Methyl groups are more of a switch, telling your cell whether to express this gene or not. Histones are more like a knob, telling the gene how much to express. On your DNA, there are these epigenetic marks, and although your DNA will never change throughout your life, the epigenetic marks will.
The choices you make in your life, such as diet, exercise, alcohol and drug use, will change these epigenetic tags. These tags will decide what genes are being expressed in that moment of your life. They will change often throughout your lifetime, more commonly when your body is going through big changes such as puberty or pregnancy. These tags are essentially what make you different from your twin. If you enjoy exercise and eating healthy, those factors would become epigenetic tags that improve your health. But if you eat fast food every day and the only exercise you do is walking to your fridge, it wouldn’t necessarily matter if your parents were health nuts, as your current decisions would affect you more. You would have the potential to be healthy, but your decisions would have a bigger impact. It works the opposite way as well. If both your parents are overweight, you would have the gene for obesity. However, if you ate well and exercised, that gene would never be expressed. Epigenetic tags are personal, and scientists used to believe these tags didn’t get passed off to your offspring, which is usually the case. If you have a scar or are in incredible shape it doesn’t mean your child will be some scar-faced bodybuilder. However, there are some epigenetic traits that can get passed down by accident.
When a mother is pregnant with her child, what she eats, if she smokes and if she is stressed out, all the factors will affect her unborn fetus. Epigenetic tags can get stuck on the genome and be passed down from generation to generation, more often the bad tags then the good ones. The issue here is that these tags were never supposed to be passed down. Morally speaking, the decisions people makes for their own life shouldn’t have consequences that affect their innocent offspring. If mom or dad smokes, it’s not okay that the child will have asthma because of their poor choices. Diseases such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease are more examples of negative epigenetic tags that are supposed to be silenced, but instead are inherited. Therefore, obesity is influenced by your environment as well as the state of health your parents are in. The dietary decisions your ancestors made affect you, just as the choices you make will help determine the health of your future offspring.
Because scientists and researchers are discovering more information on how these diseases are inherited, they can develop new treatments to help silence these epigenetic tags. These advancements are incredibly helpful as they can begin epigenetic therapy or other epigenome influencing techniques to treat these diseases. In short, due to the discovery of what causes these diseases, treatments can be made that could cure various cancers, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s and numerous other diseases.
This field of biotechnology would be best used to identify the negative epigenetic tags so that doctors might be able to rid us of them for good someday. Epigenetics has contributed to the advancement to the world of biotechnology. This research allows us to understand diseases we couldn’t before, and now might be able to create cures. Most of the treatments are still in the early stages of development, as the study of epigenetics is still a relatively new concept, just formulated in the 1980’s. Yet, with the technology and information available today, it seems as if silencing these genes will very likely be in the future.
To be able to properly conduct this experiment, we researched the procedure thoroughly beforehand. We used multiple websites to see what different methods there were to the experiment, (ex: different ingredients, different quantities) and compared the differences to the other instructions. The instructions that proved to be the most common were the ones we chose to use, as it was more likely that they would be successful. We also watched YouTube videos to see how the results would look in action.
Procedure
To carry out this experiment, we used clean pennies, 115 ml of water, 3g of zinc metal powder, 65 ml of sodium hydroxide, a hotplate and 2 beakers. First, we filled one of our beakers will 115 ml of water, the other was filled with water as well but the amount was not specific. We then added the sodium hydroxide to the water as well as the zinc powder to the 115 ml of water. After stirring it for a bit, we placed the solution on the hot plate and let it heat up until it came to a gentle boil. Once it was boiling, we added in the pennies and let them “cook” for a few minutes until we could see that they had a silver coating. We then removed the pennies using tongs, and dropped them in our other beaker of water so they could cool down.
To turn the pennies gold, after they had been turned silver and cooled down, we placed them on the hot plate. The pennies then quickly changed from silver to a gold colour. Then we dropped the gold penny in cold water, and we had our “gold” and “silver” pennies.
Chemical reaction
The science behind changing the penny’s appearance for the silver pennies was galvanization. The hot sodium hydroxide reacted with the zinc metal to make a soluble sodium zincate which then became a metallic zinc when it touched the copper pennies. This resulted in the pennies being coated in zinc, giving them a silver-like appearance. For the gold pennies, when the copper and zinc came in contact with direct heat, the zinc and copper fused together to form a brass coating which has a golden colour.
Outcome
Our experiment was successful, we were able to achieve both gold and silver coloured pennies.
Magic
This experiment is magical because you are taking something that now has no value in the Canadian monetary system, and giving the impression that it has now transformed into something of higher value (silver and gold). The process of turning the silver penny gold is especially magical looking. The silver penny appears to turn gold all on its own, there is no stirring, boiling, or other liquids involved.
In conclusion, Hubba Bubba produces larger bubbles compared to Big League Chew. The texture of Hubba Bubba and strength of the gum seemed to make it easier for it to hold a larger bubble. Where as Big League Chew was very soft and almost liquid like, making bubble-blowing more difficult. However, when stretching the gum out, Big League Chew had the advantage as it was softer, somehow making it easier to stretch out. Hubba Bubba was a denser gum, and it snapped easily when trying to do the same. Our hypothesis that Hubba Bubba would make bigger bubbles was correct, as well as our hypothesis that the softer gum would be more malleable therefore easier to stretch out.
Underwater volcanoes (or submarine volcanoes) can be found at convergent plate boundaries. A famous string of submarine volcanoes is called the ring of fire. This subduction zone surrounds a large part of the Pacific ocean, and when they erupt these volcanoes often form small islands that last for a brief amount of time. The tectonic plates push against each other and overlap, and magma is recycled and explodes out of the earth in the form of a volcano.
