Life

Top left clockwise: lichen on rock, hawk on street light, autumnal trees, grasses, plants, cheeky squirrel 

Top left clockwise: chipmunk (also cheeky), moose, duck, the same hawk, milkweed

Most people would consider all those things to be living things, but what do they have in common that makes them "living" and how do they differ from these things

Top left counterclockwise: minerals at the School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, cabbage rolls, fire (too close to my fingers), water worn arcose sandstone pebble, water from our tap

 things that people consider non-living like rocks and fire and tornadoes and steaks and (and this is a really tough one), viruses.

Animals are animated....they move around under their own volition. It's no coincidence that the two word, "animal" and "animated" are similar. In classical Greek thought, the soul (animus) is what animated animals. An animist is a person who believes that everything possesses soul (or spirit, those two words tend to be rather nebulous in meaning, sometimes interchangeable, sometimes not) but they don't usually require motion, just some kind of self recognition. The closely related panpsychic is a person that believes that everything has consciousness.

Animation might be regarded as a characteristic of living things. Even plants move in relation to light. But a lot of things move. Air and water move, generally in response to gravity, but plants and animals also move in response to other things. Fire spreads. Maybe movement isn't a good choice for something that's fundamental to life.

These problematic things that I listed above: rocks, fire, tornadoes, steaks and viruses......maybe they have to display a set of characteristics to qualify as "living", what Wittgenstein called a "family resemblance.

Not long ago, most people who even thought of such things were vitalists. They believed that living things were living because they possessed a mysterious energy that animated them, but the more people studied living things, they first found that the chemicals that percolated through living bodies, organic chemicals, could be produced from inorganic chemicals through regular chemical changes, and that life seemed to emerge from chemical reactions.

Over time, scientists came up with a list of characteristics that qualified things as "living". Here they are:

1. Living things grow. They take materials out of their environment and make it part of themselves.

2. Living things reproduce. They create similar things to themselves with important modifications  

3.  Living things respond to their environment.

4. Living things use and emit energy using chemical reactions called "metabolism.

5.  Living things maintain their internal state within tolerable limits. That's called "homeostasis".

6. Living things evolve. When they make copies of themselves, they do so to adapt their kind to their environment. They tend to create offspring that work better than themselves 

The mineral crystals grew into the form they display in the School of Mines museum, but any internal change of state is driven by outside influences. 

The cabbage roles used to be alive but they can't create other cabbage roles by themselves. They'll never produce seeds like the cabbages they once were . If they're hot, it's because the air around them heated them. They can't maintain a constant body temperature.

The fire uses fuel to transform chemicals into heat and it grows and can even split into more fires, consuming as they go. But they can't maintain an internal state that allows them to just keep going.

The rock and the water are at the mercy of their environment. They can't protect themselves.

These are the things I'll be looking at in the future. 

Go outside and look around. Do you see all the living things? Are you missing anything? Did you notice the fungi in the soil beneath you? What about yourself? You carry a world of living things around with you.....tiny mites that clean your skin and hair of microorganisms, bacteria in your gut that help you digest your food.....Did you look under the rocks? Look closer.

Biology resources

There have been many changes in science curricula since I was in school. Most of the stuff back then was descriptive. Physics was more structural mechanics. Now there's a lot more subatomic stuff and cosmology. Chemistry was more about how the elements and their compounds looked and behaved. Now, there's a lot more mathematics....calculating yields and such, and more about what happens at the atomic level.

Biology.....they used to talk about cells, organization of bodies, cell division, and the tree of life (organization of species) but now the tree of life is a different tree. It used to be based on observable similarities between different plants and animals ( and there were only two kingdoms.....plants and animals) but now it's based on similarities between their DNA which reflects how living things are related through evolutionary development.

I'm watching the lectures from the MIT introductory course in biology. They start with molecular chemistry then briefly touch on cellular organization. Then they spend a lot of time on how genetic materials translate into proteins. They end up with considerable amounts of medical biology....stem cells, immunology, cancer...

If you want a deep introduction, the MIT course is at https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-2018 .

As usual, there's a lot out there. Let's see. What's in my tool chest? It's nice to have all my tools in one place so I try to consolidate as much as I can on my phone. Beside the general purpose apps I've been using (the calculators, sensor apps, and general purpose tools) there are some useful programs specifically oriented toward biology.

A major emphasis on biology is imaging. Biological entities range from submicroscopic viruses (we won't be looking at them since it would take some very expensive and very non-portable equipment, like electron microscopes. We might do some Internet safaris, though ) to whole forests of Aspen trees (an Aspen Grove may well be a single organism.) The parts of organisms are important also, from the molecules that power them (again, too small for us to actually see) to individual cells, to whole ecosystems.

I walked down to Dry Creek Park the other day to take some pictures. I was a bit disappointed. We're in a period of cooling and frequent storms and everything was quiet......no birds or squirrels in sight. The creek was flowing so that microorganisms are washing downstream.....no stagnant water there to play with and the cold water encourages them to go dormant. Still, I got a few pictures.

This ash tree was still green. The grass in my lawn looks like it's getting ready for fall but the trees haven't quite caught on yet 

I have some identification books stored in my phone but I used Google Lens to check my identification. Once you have an image in Google Pictures, a poke at the Lens button  will search the Internet for a similar image. There are similar apps available for different phones and computers.

I can zoom in with my phone camera to about eight times (8x) but notice that, in the photos of an ash leaf above, the more I zoom, the blurrier the picture is. In an electronic camera, the number of light sensitive elements (pixels) there are in the CCD (charge-coupled device chip...the part of the electronic camera that replaced the film in older cameras and changes patterns of light into electrical signals)  is constant. Since the picture resolution is determined by the number of pixels available, that's constant, too. Resolution is usually specified as the number of pixels on the CCD. In my phone, the front camera ( the one on the same side as the user....the "selfie camera") has 16 mega pixels ("mega"="million") and the back camera (the one I usually use) has 50 megapixels. My phone actually has three lenses that focus the light on different sections of the CCD.

Imaging is important in biology because there is so much detail that matters that is hard or impossible to see. You probably got to use laboratory microscopes in school that magnified to over a thousand times. Field microscopes are usually lower powered for a couple of reasons. Portability is an obvious virtue in a microscope that will be in the field. Often, though, samples are brought back to the laboratory for examination. Most laboratory microscopes used to look at field samples trade resolution for field of view. They're usually bulkier than laboratory microscopes and have two eyepieces ("stereoscopic microscopes") to enhance the dimensionality of the image.

I determined the optical characteristics of my camera here:

http://adventuringbcc.blogspot.com/2021/05/i-am-camera.html

I have a very portable clip-on microscope for my phone that is quite serviceable in the field. It's rated at 60x magnification with more magnification possible with zoom.

That's sorta an advertising misinformation. You can get larger pictures with electronic zoom but the resolution remains the same so a zoomed picture will be blurry. Still, you have to zoom to get rid of the "tunnel" effect in the top picture above. I can get a fairly reasonable image at around 80 or 90x. The maximum around 120x is pretty poor.

There are ways to improve a blurry image. Most phone cameras have editing features that allow you to play around with a photo image. "Sharpen" is one that can improve an enlarged image. It senses borders in the image and averages the values of the pixels around the border, replacing the pixels on the border with the averages. It's an illusory improvement that can miss some important details, but with some skill, a photographer can get some decent photomicrographs like that. There are also "magnifying glass" apps that have the sharpen feature built in.

The bottom line is that if you want really good photomicrographs, use optical magnification instead of electronic (zoom) magnification.

I also have a clip-on front camera microscope that has a stage like laboratory microscopes and uses transmitted light (my other clip-on has a built in light that reflects light off the sample). Actually, I got that microscope with the "Cells" Science Wiz kit. 

Here is some stuff I found in Little Dry Creek. It's not very impressive since the water flow was pretty high and the water was cold. All the little beasties were hiding for the autumn. The magnification is about the same - around 60x.

Big things and distance views are important in biology field work also. My Carson telephoto lens will give me a moderate field, zoomable, magnification of six times. That's about perfect for wildlife photography. You want to be far enough from wildlife to avoid spooking them or from being mauled or trampled by them.

At telephoto distances, tiny movements of the camera can blur the image so a camera tripod with a phone adapter is necessary. For wildlife photography the tripod needs to be set up in a location that's as obsured as possible and a portable blind is useful. On the day I was taking photos for this blog, everyone was at home asleep. Winter does that sometimes. Anyway ....leaves.

And, of course, phone cameras usually have a video mode that lets you take movies of, say, wildlife behavior.

Microscopy requires things like stains, slides, droppers, knives to slice samples. There are good kits that aren't expensive. I have a couple from Home Science Tools and the Cells kit from Science Wiz.

A particularly useful tool is a microtome that lets you make very thin slices of materials to put on microscope slides. You can pay as much as you want for one. Mine:

an economy model, cost less than $20 and came with a razor blade. It's basically a flat plate with a screw piston that pushes the sample by tiny increments up through the center of the plate so it can be sliced off. Table models can run to four figures but you don't want a table models in your backpack, anyway.

I won't be doing any high powered microscopy but it can be pretty fascinating. You can equip yourself for considerably less than a thousand dollars (or more) and a good source is American Science and Surplus. Avoid the cheap kiddie microscopes. The affordable ones have poor, plastic optics and are not worth the savings. A good option, around $100 is the Celestron line of digital microscopes. 

There's life out there (even in the winter.) so go out and study it!

The Education of Wolf VanZandt....in Biology

So, how do I relate to biology? Well, I am biological. I'm right in the middle of it all 

I don't understand how a person who pours over their car's driver manual can completely neglect learning about their own bodies . Sure, it's more complex, but it's also a lot more critical.

My first few months of college was just general curriculum but that quickly phased into a five year program in pharmacy. That was, of course, all kinds of biology. My first college course in biology was an introduction to biology. It was a laboratory course. We went into the classroom to perform the next exercise. The only time we saw an instructor was if we needed extra help. Tests were administered by assistants. I think that was my favorite college course.

I was sick for a week during that time and got behind, so when I went back I spent a day catching up on dissections. I also learned what formaldehyde poisoning felt like.

I met my longest term friend there. Paul Holm and I have been hiking together from that class in 1973 until I moved to Denver in 2013. We still check on each other occasionally.

There was a series of courses in Pharmacy that pushed my memory past its limits. It was a three quarter series and we were required to memorize 20 drugs a day....chemical and trade names, major manufacturers, chemical structure, action on the body, side effects. The courses were pulling my grades down and I intended to get a double major so with two quarters left to gain a degree in Pharmacy, I transfered to the School of Psychology.

At the time, neuropsychology wasn't a thing, but that was where I wanted to go so pharmacy was a way to get a solid foundation in physiology before moving to the more behavioral aspects of psychology. A student had to choose a framework to follow and, at Auburn, the choices were behaviorism (which I dispised at the time) and personality psychology (which, although I enjoyed, I wanted something more integrated.....there wasn't the "integrated psychology" discipline at the time). There was also social psychology and that was the closest match to what I wanted that I could find. And after graduating with a bachelor's degree in psychology, I entered a master's curriculum in rehabilitation and special education with focused in vocational evaluation and research design. And that was my formal education.

My informal education involved asking questions about everything that came up. I've always seen my medical incidences as opportunities to learn, including things like endurance hikes that pushed me beyond my limits, where my "instruments would swing into the red zone".

For instance, I'm just finishing up surgery and recovery for a detached retina. I have plenty of intimate details about my eyes (which I will share with you as time goes on). The bubble vanished the day before yesterday; I am again free to hike above 7000 feet and I am able to concentrate for more than five minutes on what I am typing.

So, where I stand in respect to biology.....I'm not a biologist but I am a retired public health professional. I have plenty to learn but I've picked up a lot along the way.

And it's not bookkeeping, so I have the incentive to learn.

So, what about you? Are you interested in the life around and in you and how it works? Biology gets as deep as you might want to go.

--- A Day at the Zoo ---

I spent a day at the zoo with some friends and family. It's hot here and many of the animals are trying to stay out of the sun. One giraffe was hugging the side of a building trying to stay in the thin shade.

But the most populous exhibit was well represented and visible. Humanity was out in force, and, of course, there are really few better places to observe human nature than the zoo.

Well, but I'm not going there in this blog. You might have noticed that I rarely show pictures of recognizable humans.  They're there and I enjoy watching them and talking to them, but the only time I will include an interaction is when everybody involved has given me the go ahead. And, it's a small world, yes, it is. I could easily get someone in trouble by publishing their image and it would be purely accidental - so I just don't do it.

But I'm pretty sure that the following pictures won't get my subjects into trouble, and there won't be a lot of narrative here. I hope you enjoy the pictures.

                                                              [Pinstripe horses (zebras)]

[Fat polar bear]

[Poison dart frogs]

[Snakes]

[Capybara - this one's not from Georgia]

[Lion fish - wonder if they know the poison frogs]

[Lizards and turtles]

[Tiger]

[Okapi]

[Elephant - he knows he's the center of attraction]

There were zoo staff wondering around that were plum happy to tell you about they're favorite animals, and then there were shows. I couldn't get a good shot of the tapirs (they were trying to stay out of the heat) but a proud zoo staff told us about their many children and where they are. (He sounded like he was one of the parents!)

[Headless monkey - actually, he was just keeping his head down.]

[It's hot here. Rhino knows hot]

[Gorilla - trying to ignore the other primates]

[Grizzly bears]

[Dahl's sheep]

Do you have a zoo close to you? Zoos usually offer more than just a stroll among the animal enclosures. The shows are educational and often tell you about current research in biology. Many zoos double as botanical gardens. And you can always peoplewatch there.