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My project consists of 7 photos in one, along with a couple more layers. My goal was to ultimately learn more about image editing, and I was definitely successful in doing so. Overall, I wanted the image to have the story of a person running, representing life, while the demons represent negativity or real demons, and the angels represent encouragement or real angels. The first thing I did for this project was put the photos on the background. After I did that, I moved them around so that they would seem like they are in the correct place, and where I wanted them to be. For the demons, I wanted it to look like they were behind the person running. For the angels, I wanted them to look like they were guiding the person running, so I put them in the air in front of the trees. Then, I tried to make the ground darker so that the demons would flow better, and that was a failure at first. I darkened the angels just a bit so that they would blend in better, and that gave them a sort of glow, which was cool. What was a first a failure, trying to make the demons flow, turned into a success because I turned the opacity down slightly to make them look more ghostly.

Through the completion of the project, I learned how to put images on other images, edit certain areas in the image, change the brightness and contrast as well as the color of the image, create layers, and duplicate images. What I learned about myself is that it is good to get help for something you are new at. However, at some point, I learned to figure it out myself, which benefited me in the end. The main problem I faced was the technical side of things. So, I really wouldn’t have done anything differently if I knew the same as I knew at the beginning of this project. One tip I would give others doing this project is get to know everything there is to know about your image editing program. Whether you are using Adobe, Pixlr, Polarr, or Inkscape, know as much as you can about the program, and if you don’t understand anything, ask questions. Also, never give up, because there were parts where I was frustrated, but I kept going, and eventually learned something new. This whole project inspired me to build things, whether online or not, and made more creative overall.

Look at me in my brown eyes, what do you see?

I see strong, I see brave, I see beauty in me

I feel pride from my head all the way to my feet

I can taste the independence inside me

Pitch black and total darkness.

Sing a song, filled with light and courage.

Wipe all of your salty tears and get rid of that salty flavors that burdens your soul.

The fresh air of freedom is here.

People rejoicing throughout the land, hearts soaring through the sky.

As the sun is bright because it lit up the darkness.

Shanni-kie Watson

February 10th, 2017

The Human Body

Current Event: Human stem cell with half a genome could help infertile couples

Link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2081250-human-stem-cell-with-half-a-genome-could-help-infertile-couples/

Summary:

Scientists have created a new kind of human stem cell that has just half a genome. To create the novel stem cells, Benvenisty’s colleague, Dieter Egli from Columbia University Medical Center and the New York Stem Cell Foundation, used electricity and chemicals to force an unfertilised human egg cell to divide.

Having a set of human cells with only one set of chromosomes will help our understanding of how gene mutations affect the behaviour of cells, says Jose Silva, a researcher at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in the UK.Embryonic stem cells are diploid cells from which all tissues in the body are built. They are called diploid cells.

Now that we can make haploid versions of any cell in the human body with one set of chromosomes, researchers can easily mutate single genes and immediately see what happens to the behaviour of the cell.

“Since we’ve shown they can, it poses the interesting question of why we reproduce sexually rather than from a single parent.” The new embryonic stem cells could potentially be used to create eggs and sperm for infertile couples.

Now, Nissim Benvenisty, director of the Azrieli Center for Stem Cells and Genetic Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues have generated haploid embryonic stem cells with a single set of chromosomes.

“Most researchers believed human haploid cells could not divide and differentiate into different cell types,” says Benvenisty. The cells can be turned into any tissue in the human body, despite only containing one set of chromosomes. Egg and sperm cells are the exception – they are haploid cells with one set of chromosomes. They then showed that it was possible for these haploid cells to divide and turn into other tissues such as heart, brain and gut cells.

Reaction/Opinion: My reaction the article was that the article is really interesting and it reminded me of what I had learnt in my biochem class in 1th grade. It is always a good thing to hear or learn about what goes on inside the human body. Is it always good to see scientists constantly finding new researches in the world of science.  

Questions:

1. How did they come to discover this?

2. Is it a 100% that this can create sterms and eggs for infertile couples?

MLA Citation

"Human stem cell with half a genome could help infertile couples." New Scientist. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2017.

This project has been very meaningful to this group. We have been able to care for and watch plants grow as if they were our children. We literally checked on them everyday to see if they were growing. Our plants didn't grow as much as other groups but we tried. Factors that may have affected the growth of our plants could have been over watering, not enough sunlight, too much or too little vermiculite or they were just growing very slowly. The conclusions from these factors and this project that we can draw are to make sure that we place our plants in perfect or close to perfect conditions so that they are fit to grow and grow healthy at that. This project has really been amazing and we would love to do it again. We will still check in everyday to make sure that our plants are doing well