2nd term expectancy

I'm really excited about the team work that will be doing this term. I think that will be useful for the future. I like the subject we'll be working with and i'm sure that learning some tecnical vocabulary will be useful too.

Origin of life

PechaKucha: Origin of life

1. Hello, we are going to speak about the origin of life pointed from the religious myths and scientific theories. There are a lot of different myths because each culture has tried to explain our origin in their own way.
2.  For example, the maya myth says that the Popol Vuh (their god) created animals first,  then wet clay,  wood, and after that he created the first ancestors from maiz dough
3. In china, there is another myth: in the beinning the universe was a chaos. A cosmic egg appeared and  the egg was divided into three parts. From one part was created the sky, from another part was created the earth and from de inside art of the edd was created Pangu, a primitive human beeing
4. One of the religious theories about the origi of life is the creationism. This theory says that God created heaven and Earth in seven days an then Adam and Eva were send to that paradise to develop the human being.
5. In the Islam, another god, Alah; created the univerese in six long spans of time. In a lot of religions we can see myths and gods who were created to explain the things that we couldn´t explain using science.
6. Jainism: this religious theory says that there is no creator, They feel that no single beimg exists who could create the world and they question and critizise how an immaterial God could create a material planet.
7. Sikhism: Sikhs believe that God created the whole universe. Earth while being in the universe is a creation of God and all the life on Earth is a creation of God. It doesn't matter to a Sikh whether Earth was created in seven days or in 4 billion years.
8. Scientifically, the first living matter is considered to be the first cell that could do all the life functions: feeding, reproducting and relating to other cells or the environment. As you can see in the picture, the first cell was very simple, the DNA was not in a nucleus yet.
9. Panspermia is a scientific theory which says that life was created in Mars and an asteroid brought it to Earth, so we all are Martians originally. This theory was proposed by Herman Von Helmholtz.
10. According to the theory of the simple begginings the life might have begun with small molecules that interacted with each other and became more complex, like RNA or DNA. so the RNA wouldn´t be the first gene  molecule.
11. RNA world: this theory says that RNA was spontaneously arisen on Earth and it was developped into DNA, but although some scientists think that molecules could have spontaneously arisen on Earth, others say thtat was very unlikey to have happened.
12. There is another scienifical theory, called the chilly start. It says that the oceans might have been covered by ice. the ice might have protected the molecules and allowed them to react and they became more complex.
13. Deep.sea vents: life was created at submarine hydrothermal vents because this places are very rich in chemical and thermal energy. The rocky nooks could have concentrated hydrogen molecules and provided mineral catalysts for electrical reactions.
14. Then, the comunity clay theory  defends that the first molecules were met on clay because it had a lot of organic compounds and helped them to organize  like our genes do. So the clay woud have been an appropiate place for the begining of life. 
15. Electric spark: the compounds of the reducing atmosphere reacted with the energy of an electric spark and the first organic molecules were created. The scientist Miller-Urley did an experiment to prove this theory.
16. The abiogenesis is how we call scientifically the origin of life. "A" means none, "bio" means life and "genesis" means beggining and it was suposed to happen after the Big-Bang and the creation of the univerese and the planets, in the primordial soup and then the life was developed.
17. Abiogenesis is the natural process of life arising from non living matter. It happened more or less 4 billion years ago when the first organic compounds or cells reacted and gave rise to a living system.
18. Oparin was a Russian biochemist who was interested in the origin of life. He reviewed some panspermia theories but he didn´t think that was possible so he worked on a new theory with Haldane and made an experiment (similar to Miller-Urley´s)
19. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was a British-Indian scientist who developped the theory of "Primordial Soup".This theory says that the origin of life on Earth consists on transformation of molecules.
20. Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist. His principles discoveries were vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. With his experiments he prooved that life couldn´t arise spontaneously.

Irène Joliot-Curie

Iréne Joliot-Curie was born on 12 September 1897 in Paris, France. She was the daughter of Marie Curie and a scientist, like her mother. She is known because she discovered artificial radioactivity and she won a Nobel price because of her discovery. She studied on Collège Sévigné for two years and then onto the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne but her studies were interrupted by the WWI. After the War, Curie returned to Paris to study at the Radium Institute, which had been built by her parents. Curie became Doctor of Science in 1925. During WWII Joliot-Curie got tuberculosis and was forced to spend several years convalescing in Switzerland. To make the situation easier she left her husband and children in France and it was hard to visits back to France, enduring detention by German troops at the Swistzerland border on more than one occasion. Finally, in 1944 Joliot-Curie judged it too dangerous for her family to stay in France and she took her children back to Switzerland. In 1956, after a final convalescent period in the French Alps, Joliot-Curie was admitted to the Curie hospital in Paris, where she died on 17 March at the age of 58 from leukemia.

Mass media & science

	Section	Frecuency	Extension	Generic themes	Pseudoscience
Noticias de Gipuzkoa	Sub-section: internet and science	1 per week	1 page	Sports, technology, health, economy	No
El país	Yes	Every day	1 page	Science, technology, sport	Horoscope
La razón	Sub-section: “a tu salud”	1 per forthnight	½ page	Culture, religion, society
Berria	No	-------	-------	Society, relevant news	No
ABC	Sub-section: technology	Every day	?	Relevant news	No
Gara	Yes	Every day	½ page	Relevant news	No
Vanguardia	No	-------	-------	Sport, thechnology, life	No

I think that mass media are doing a great job showing the reality of this world to all the people. But sometimes they forget the news too fast, when another problem comes up they forget the importance of the old one.

Editing genes

Scientists in London apply for license to edit genes in human embryos.

The researcher Kathy Niakan said that her team wanted to use a recently developed technique with human embryos. Nowadays, that´s illegal in the UK even if editing the genomes could eradicate some genetic diseases. Research work is possible with a license of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), so why not use the new developments to treat the genetic diseases in human beings?
 “It will be considered in due course,” the HFEA said. But there is a moral problem whith this issue. On one hand, we could bring the edition of a human embryo into question, because it means changin the natural process of those embryos. In the other hand, we could eradicate diseases, we could improve the cuality of life of a lot of babies and a chinese team of scientist has tried it. That team, led by Junjiu Huang, modified the gene that causes a blood disease  (the blood disorder β-thalassaemia) in non-viable embryos and it caused huge controversy. Even if in China genes of human embryos have been edited, we will have to wait for the decission of the HFEA to see the succes that this new technique could have in the British people´s lives.

Migrant crisis

Nowadays there is a migrant crisis in all Europe, the syrian refugees are running away from their cauntry because of the war. The war started in 2011 when the uprising that the syrian government turned violent. The war has gone to bad in Syria and the inhabitants are coming in droves to Europe. Every day, a lot of boats arrive to Lesbos (Greece) and there are also a lot of boats that sink in the Aegean Sea. All the migrants want to arrive to syria but it´s not an easy way. 

Last week, the dead body of a young boy appeared on a Turkish beach and twelve migrants, thought to be syrian refugees, were drowned and appeared in the coast of the Greek island of Kos. The 3-year-old boy was Aylan Kurdi, a child from the northhern Syria who tried to came to Europe with his 5-year-old brother (who unfortunately died in the same boat). About 11 million people (half of Syria´s population) have either died or left their homes since the war began. The Euopen Union policymakers and leaders have convened an emergency summit today to find a solution to this problem but it´s too late to all migrants who have died up to now.

Scientific culture

I expect to improve my english and enjoy myself. I want to learn new things not only in english, but in sciences too.