Green Plastic

How are green plastics being developed?
Green plastics are develpoed by taking chains on polyactic acid which all come together to make polyactic acid oligmers, when due to a chemical reaction become lactide which then become PLA which is the most manufacture type of bio plastic.
What makes these plastics green?
The substances they usually come from is corn, sugar cane, or sugar beet. This makes the natural, biodegradable and renewable. Which pretty much makes them quite green.
What where some of the issues mentioned with the packaging?
Well the packaging can cause effects like:
-Growing corn which makes us use more pesticides, herbicides.
-This also leads to using trucks and these use oil and gas and then emit carbon dioxide.
- We could start using to much food for plastic and end up in a food crisis
- Use to much land for crops
- Bio plastics can biodegrade and give off methane.
How might these green plastics change packaging practices?
It might change it in terms of making the packaging more eco friendly and making our planet better.

ChemMatters - Episode 2: Plastics Go Green from ACS Pressroom on Vimeo.

Food, INC. Reflection

After watching food, inc. my impression of how the science, technology of food industry and society are interrelated is that, society not only depends on the food industry but it also influences the food industry. If you think about it we need food to survive but depending what we buy we also influence the food industry.Society then tells the food industry what the demand is, better tasting,etc, and that goes straight to the science of the food industry. The science of the food industry then alters our food to better suit the consumer(society), using the technology, and the circle starts again. The question is does the science and technology of the food industry have a negative or a positive impact on society or environment, well this film definitely describes the negative impact on society and environment. So how do we affect this all, it is in fact supply and demand, the companies supply what we demand so we can alter what is on the market and even (if we refuse to my products that we not made with correct and cleanly practices) change they way our food is made. This is sort of how we are connected to this earth, because we can change the way the people who handle our earth. We will say no to high tech devices when we learn to say no to the big companies and stop relying on them. We only really care about how because that is what gives us the product and that is what we want to why isn't important to most of society because that makes everything much to complicated and expensive. Natural farming is in moderation and letting most thing be natural while industrial farming is forcing animals to grow faster, lay more, etc. making everything go at a faster pace. Well natural farming is better for the costumer because in terms of health it is much healthier but for the food industry industrial is better because it makes things much faster and they can supply quicker. Science and technology are responsible for making things fatter, bigger and cheaper but this also makes it more unhealthy which ruins our human health and ruins our survival with GMO foods because the GMO foods eventually over power the natural foods making there only 1 type of unhealthy plant. We definitely saw health costs in this film with the bacteria and obesity due to the foods, we saw environmental costs as well with the fields and fields used for agriculture. Economic costs where prevalent because having workers work for you and dropping because of conditions and also paying people to not speak about your company all costs money. I thought this film really shows you the true gory details and showed me why my mum forces such strong healthy eating habits unto me and my brother.

Current Events: Can cacti escape global warming?

97F (36C), thats how high air temperatures can get in the summers of the Chihuahuan Desert in Southern Texas, but thats not as bad as the found temperatures which can exceed 158F (70C)! When plants encounter this type of extreme heat they have to find very creative ways to survive in this kind of trecherous and maybe lethal environment. Work by Dr.Gretchen North and her colleagues shed the light in how cactus Ariocarpus fissuratus, which is a desert resident, copes with these high temperatures. A crucial point is that small desert plants such as "living rock" (which is the name for the cacti) can live on the surface of desert soil, one of the hottest habitats on earth. How did this type of cacti earn its name the "living rock"? This is because this cactus blends into it rocky surroundings and is level with surroundings. A hypothesis researchers have is that this cactus could almost "escape" high temperatures by moving slowly below soil surface, which is cooler. North and co-workers determined that the cactus moves deeper in to soil using it roots, to find this they measured changes in plants depth and the anatomy of the root. But does this help play a protective role by modulating temperatures. To figure this out researchers took plants growing on a rooftop on Los Angeles and mimicked summer desert conditions. In this experiment the air temperatures where about above 99F for several days. The cacti were all grown in soil that was sandy which is similar to there native habitat. Yet half of them had rocks covering the surface of soil the stems of these plants had a temperature internally which was about 39F lower then those grown in just sandy soil. Th cacti in just sandy soil all died, but those in the rocky soil survived. This survival was aided by the root contraction because it lowered the stem temperature. "Even in rocky soil, experimental plants attained nearly lethal temperatures during a summer heat wave in Los Angeles" said North. Meaning that maybe root contraction and rocky soil wont be enough to protect if desert temperatures get any higher due to global warming.
I chose this article because we are doing products on packaging and how if you do not recycle it effects your environment, so I chose to do this current event because it explained an effect of global warming. I think that to prevent even the predicament of having plants that are trying to protect themselves against global warming would not be happening if we could better sustain our planet and we can do this by recycling, turning off light, etc. So many little things can help.

American Journal of Botany.
"Can cacti 'escape' underground in high temperatures?
How a certain species will potentially handle
global warming." ScienceDaily 25 November
2010. 28 November 2010
/releases/2010/11/101124162220.htm>.

Owl Prey graph and pie chart

Answers to questions 1,3,5 in packet.
My data collected:
5.50%- Birds
1.11%- Shrew
20.32%-Mouse
31.44%- Vole
41.61%- Rat
1. Looking at the data we collected as a class I think that the prey that is most frequently consumed by the "owl population" is the Rat. This makes sense because rats are big which means nutrients and more food for the owl. Yet also rats are fast breeders and their are lots of them. Also rats are usually slower and less quick making them easy prey.
3. I think the smarter choice between 35 insects at 1g each or one 35g vole when looking at conserving energy is definitely the vole, because both of them will give you the same energy value if you didn't have to hunt for them. Since you have to find each insect, which would mean you would have to hunt, eat, hunt, eat, etc., you are wasting the energy you just collected on hunting again yet with the vole you simply catch, eat, rest which means in conclusion you will have much more energy.
5. Looking at the data we collected you will see that the percentage of shrew in an owls diet is 1%, which is not very much at all. So if the shrew population declined I doubt it would have any to no affect whatsoever. This is because shrews are such a small part of the owl diet they really do not depend on them.

Current Events: What killed these whales?

The whales have been a lot of issues lately, first sunburn and now the bodies of 33 whales washed ashore on Rutland Island on the northwest coast of Ireland. It is one of the biggest mass whale deaths in Ireland ever and environmentalists are still stumped over what could have killed these whales. Experts are running tests on these deep-diving pilot whales and have found that these whales were dead very much before they reached the shore. Some say they might have died from illness after a deadly storm hit. People are pointing fingers at the Royal Navy because one theory is that their sonar equipment damaged they whales hearing. First piece of evidence that needs to be collected is whether the group of whales spotted of Scotland's South Uist coast a week ago are they same that have just been beached.Since the whales spotted in Scotland were being monitored by the British Divers Marine but went off the radars after a storm made them impossible to track. These types of things are not always rare on the Irish coast. Yet this time environmentalists are very concerned with the fact that this might have something to do with the Royal Navy using sonar equipment that might have caused this mass death. Sonar equipment with low-frequency can emit a noise which can sound as loud as a jumbo jet taking off This can damage a whales hearing severely. This is bad becasue whales rely on their hearing to care for their young, follow migratory routes and find food sources. So this means it is impossible for them to live if their hearing is damaged. Yet this is not old news, studies have shown that due to sonar equipment not only whales but also dolphins have been affected. There are many reasons these whales could've died but the most important thing is preventing it from happening again.
I chose this article becasue I think whales have been the focus of many problems when it comes to the interaction between them and us. Meaning we are profoundly effecting them with our habits. This is important because the whales we lose cannot be replaced naturally as fast as they die unnaturally meaning this could effect the food chain or Eco system in that area. I think that this ties into our unit that we are finishing up which is all about Eco systems and how small things effect the bigger picture. I think the best way to prevent whale mortality is to not use the sonar equipment in areas which have whales in them.

Human Footprint

Sustainability to me is the ability to be able to go on with your daily while living in harmony with the earth. Ways to do this is to conserve water by taking shorter showers,recycling the plastic we use and simply cutting down. Using a site that calculates how much of a certain product you use in a lifetime based on how much you use in a week or maybe in a day. Using this I found out that I will use around:
8,086 eggs in my lifetime
12,129 newspapers in my lifetime
16,172 glasses of milk in my lifetime
I will drive 270,465 miles in my lifetime
4,043 bananas in my lifetime
100 sodas in my lifetime (This is because I do not drink soda that much)
28,301 shower in my lifetime
8,086 potatoes in my lifetime
1,095 slices of bread in my lifetime.
For me something I could do is to cut down on newspaper and instead read the news online. Yet if I do have to buy a newspaper I should remember to recycle the newspaper. This is mainly my human footprint. A human footprint is what we consume and how it makes an impact or imprint on the earth. We have to learn how to make our footprint less "deep" and make it have less of an impact.

Current Events; Whales and Sunscreen?

Sunburns are generally something humans usually get but recent studies have shown that now whales are also getting sunburns, these cases have also become more frequent over the years.
Proceedings of Royal Society B was the first place where this study was published. It shows how the damage of the whale’s skin due to the sun is on the rise. This is most likely because the ozone layer is thinning which is increasing the levels of ultraviolet radiation. They get sunburned because they have to come to the surface to breathe yet there is no hair, feather or fur to protect from the rays. Hiding in the shade is how some other animals have adapted to this predicament yet whales cannot do this. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, a postdoctoral fellow at the Zoological Society of London and her colleagues have looked at this problem, and together they have preformed skin biopsies and photo surveys in the Gulf of California on blue, fin and sperm whales. In this region, which is near the tropical latitudes, the dosages of skin cancer radiation are much higher than in the mid-latitude zones. With stainless steel dart skin samples from 2007 to 2009, all the skin cells collected were sunburn cells/ abnormal cells these are cells that have been DNA damaged by ultra-violet light. This was found even on the lowest layer of skin. Due to the over exposure of ultraviolet radiation researcher believe that these sunburns will worsen over time. For this hypothesis they tested on blue whales while bite marks and the other skin problems remained unchanged the blisters from sunburn became noticeable. Darker whales such as sperm or fin whales tend not to get as sunburned as lighter whales do, similar to humans. Yet some of these whales spend more time on the surface making them still prone to sunburn. Scientists have only recently become aware of this, since this year marks the 25th anniversary of when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered. Even though e hope that the ozone levels will return to the 1950’slevel by 2080. Yet this is a lesson from the ozone hole on how quickly our planet can change or how we can change it.
This article interested me because it made me ask questions, how do whales get sunburn? Since we just finished our one world essay presentations which really talked a lot about effects of humans on the environment this is another very good example of how we affect our world.

Current Events: Free as a bird.

Being a bird and having wings, it may seem that they have the freedom to fly wherever they like but studies down in the University of Missouri show that what happens on the ground might effect where a bird flies. As we know what everything living organism does has an effect on aspects of biology. Movement in this case determines where a bird will reproduce and where they are affects which species meets what other kind and then this dictates how the genes spread. Scientists have found the birds that do not migrate lean more to traveling over areas that are protected by trees so that if a predator attacks it is easier to make an escape and it is easier to find food. This means that man-made areas such as gaps in areas of forest, rods and housing areas can make the areas in which birds reproduce smaller. When there is less space for a bird to find a mate this can eventually lead to inbreeding which will then produce smaller and weaker birds. This then has an impact n the species of bird as a whole which is then bad for the environment. During the summer Dylan Kesler, and assistant professor in fisheries and wildlife at the University of Missouri's School of Natural Resources and a graduate student of MU named Allison Cox tagged 33 young red bellied woodpeckers from Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest. The tags were used to study the birds daily flights using radio telemetry and GPS technology but there is only 4 months of research since the tags are designed to fall of after 4 months. But this is done during the summer and fall months since this that is the time in which the young birds are the most active, are establishing territories and looking for a mate.
I found this article interesting because I thought birds are only picky when it comes to the area they lay and eventually hatch their eggs in. I did not know that birds actually rely on landscaping and how "natural" the area is to not only lay eggs but also pick a mate. I think this topic ties in with our unit because we just finished our one world presentations, which mostly talk about the effects that humans have on animals and the environment. Well, this is a good example, because if we continue to keep on cutting down trees and then building roads, buildings, etc not only will birds be forced to inbreed but deforestation will also be a problem.
To learn more:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100831164946.htm