Ch 2.5.5 - Proteins - No Clever Heading for These Molecules, They Deserve Your Respect

Proteins - No Clever Heading for These Molecules, They Deserve Your Respect

Ah proteins, the true workhorse of life. Basically if there is something to do, proteins do it. The only real exception is storing information because, as previously discussed, the douchebag nucleic acids do it and then need all the credit. Proteins are not only the real MVPs of life but they’re also some of the most complex members in the macromolecule lineup. Made up of thousands and thousands of individual units called amino acids, proteins can be as large or larger than nucleic acids. While there are only twenty unique amino acids, they can be linked together in any order they need to because three-fourths of the molecule is exactly the same for all twenty. There’s the amino (-NH) group, a hydrogen (-H), a carboxyl (-COOH) group, and then what is known as the R group. The R group is the only thing that changes from one amino acid to the next. When going through polymerization, the amino side of one will react with the carboxyl group of another, dehydration synthesis occurs resulting in the loss of water, and the two amino acids become linked with their R groups sticking off the side. Imagine taking a ladder and sawing it down the middle of all the rungs, the resulting structure would resemble a very simplified version of a string of amino acids.

This string of amino acids is known as a polypeptide because the bond that formed when we linked the two amino acids together is known as a peptide bond and now we have many of them. As we get larger and larger, we begin to start having interactions between various parts of the polypeptide and this is critical because as those interactions occur, the polypeptide changes shape and the way a protein functions is dependent on it’s form. You fuck up the form, you fuck up the function. All proteins have at least three levels of form, with the larger, more complex proteins having a fourth level. At the simplest level, known as the primary structure, we have the sequence of amino acids. This is the “half a ladder” structure I mentioned earlier. As the polypeptide grows, weak interactions (think hydrogen bonds) start to form between various places of the backbone of the molecule (so between the amino-carbon-carboxyl-repeat chain) and this presents us with the polypeptide’s secondary structure. Depending on the types of interactions and the frequency of them, the polypeptide chain can either coil into a spring-like alpha helix or do a sort of accordion fold into a beta sheet. As we get even more complex, we reach the tertiary structure where interactions between the side chains, also known as those R Groups, cause the polypeptide to fold, dip, duck, twist, doubleback, etc into what appears as a coiled mess but as we said earlier, is a very specific orientation. If the protein we’re focused on is a smaller, simpler protein, everything stops here. We have one polypeptide chain that has coiled, pleated, and folded into a given shape that can then go on to fulfill its duty. However, if it is a very large and complex protein, it may have a fourth level of organization known as the quaternary structure. This occurs when multiple polypeptides come together and is characterized by weak interactions between the various subunits.

Ch 2.5.4 Nucleic Acids - UGH, These Two...

Nucleic Acids - UGH, These Two...

While lipids may be the scapegoat and everyone hates them even though they’re super important and you wouldn’t even exist without them, nucleic acids are the Beyonce of the macromolecules. Sure they do something but they get so much credit for doing so little. Yes, they store genetic information. That’s it. GREATJOB NUCLEIC ACIDS FOR LITERALLY SITTING THERE! In their defense, that’s just DNA, the super overrated nucleic acid, that barely does anything. It stores information and then it...stores information. Once it’s done storing information, it stores information. Or gives you cancer. Yay DNA! Its cousin RNA is slightly more productive. It helps to read information and make something productive (proteins) out of the info. So it’s basically trying to salvage the image of nucleic acids by doing a little more than just sit there. 

Being nucleic acids (that’s what the NA stands for in DNA and RNA), they are both composed of monomers known as nucleotides. Each nucleotide itself is a polymer of three things: a phosphate group, a five-carbon sugar, and a nitrogenous base. The phosphate group is exactly the same for both DNA and RNA because a phosphate group can’t be different and still be a phosphate group. The sugar is almost exactly the same and is responsible for the first letter of the nucleic acid’s name. In RNA you have the sugar ribose and in DNA, you have deoxyribose. Deoxyribose is only different from ribose in the fact that in one specific location, you are missing an oxygen, hence being deoxyribose. Then there are five nitrogenous bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil. The first three listed are found in both types of nucleic acids; thymine is found only in DNA while uracil exists only in RNA. In reality, thymine is just a slightly fancier form of uracil so that’s why they’re practically the same. 

Ch 2.5.3 Lipids - The Body’s Scapegoat

Lipids - The Body’s Scapegoat

Much like the carbohydrates we just talked about, most lipids are also composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen but unlike carbs, lipids have a shit ton more hydrogen than they do oxygen. While they’re technically not true polymers, we talk about them at the same time as all the others because lipids are big, making them macromolecules, and they are important, making them worth your fucking time. Without lipids, we wouldn’t have any steroids, which include hormones, no fats, no waxes, and no cell membranes. We’ll come back to discuss the types of lipids found in cell membranes when we go through the parts of the cell so for now, we can discuss fats.

Fat has this negative image because a lot of people have too much of it and want to get rid of it but the healthiest of people still need some fat. When you look at professional bodybuilders, they’re still rocking a certain amount of body fat. Granted, it’s in the single digits percentage-wise but if they had zero percent body fat, they would be dead. (Coincidentally, a lot of them use extra lipids in the form of steroids but that’s not for me to judge.) Now when you look at a molecule of fat, you’ll see two distinct sections, the glycerol group and the fatty acid tails. Glycerol is an alcohol meaning it has at least one (it actually has three) hydroxyl (-OH) groups which serve as attachment points for the fatty acid tails by means of a dehydration reaction. The fatty acids are called this because at one end they have a carboxyl (-COOH) group. When the hydroxyl and carboxyl groups come together, a molecule of water is lost and BOOM! They’re joined together. Its entirely possible that all three fatty acids in a given fat molecule are exactly the same or they can be different, it doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is how those tails are constructed. The terms unsaturated fat, saturated fat, and trans fat come into play here and refer to the nature of the fatty acid. In an unsaturated fat (these are the “good” fats) there is at least one carbon-to-carbon double bond in at least one of the tails. In this sense, they are unsaturated with hydrogen. Alternatively, saturated fats are chocked full of hydrogens and everything is a single bond, single bonds as far as the eye can see. Comparing the the two, because of the orientation of the double bond in unsaturated fats (what’s known as a cis bond because the big parts are on the same side of the double bond), these fats can’t pack together as tightly as saturated fats can and as a result, unsaturated fats tend to be liquid at room temperature (all your oils) while saturated fats tend to be solid (butter, lard, etc). A trans fat is an unsaturated fat they turned into a saturated fat by a chemical process. They can also be partially-hydrogenated and in this case, the normally cis-oriented bonds become trans oriented, meaning the big parts are on opposites sides of the bond, and giving the trans fat its name. While this is no means a healthy living book, the majority of people say unsaturated fat good, saturated fat ok, trans fat bad.

Ch 2.5.2: Carbohydrates - why Keto is not Neato

Carbohydrates are delicious. No questions asked and no other answers accepted. I challenge you to find someone who doesn't think they're amazing and isn't a fucking liar because if they say carbs aren't angels in food form they're liars. Carbs get their name from the fact that they're made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. When you combine hydrogen and oxygen, you get water and in science, we said the fancy word for water is hydro. So carbohyrdrate means carbon and water and any carbohydrate can be abbreviated by the formula (CH2O)n where n is a whole number. The most famous carbohydrate is glucose, which has a formula of C6H12O6 and is so fucking important it's stupid. Trust me, you will have that one memorized if you read this whole book. Glucose is definitely a monomer of the more complex carbohydrates (more on those in a few paragraphs) and being simpler in nature, glucose is known as a monosaccharide, essentially meaning one sugar. It’s what our bodies and the bodies of just about everything out there uses for energy on a daily basis. That’s why diabetes is so fucked up, it messes with your ability to essentially keep yourself energized. The sugar found in the infamous high fructose corn syrup is also a monosaccharide and when you hook fructose and glucose together (both being monosaccharides) you end up with the disaccharide sucrose, which is what you think of when you think of sugar. The white, crystally stuff found in pantries and that you put in coffee, that’s sucrose.

Once we start linking a shit ton of monosaccharides together, we end up with polysaccharides. Hopefully by now you’ve picked up on the fact that the word saccharide alludes to sugar but there’s another big name-based giveaway, something you’ll want to remember, that a compound is a sugar. So far we’ve discussed glucose, fructose, and sucrose, all three ending with the same three letters. That ending, -ose, is typically a dead giveaway that you’re talking about a sugar. (Side note: don’t be that fucker that says “nose” isn’t a sugar because that has ACTUALLY happened to me and it was so fucking annoying.) Polysaccharides can go by a bunch of different names because they can be countless different things but what we’re going to focus on are three major polysaccharides that are all formed by the same monomer -- glucose (told you it was fucking important). Starch, glycogen, and cellulose (there’s the -ose) are all polymers made of the exact same monomer, glucose, just arranged in different ways. Starch is made of thousands and thousands of glucose molecules strung together and serves as the main way plants store excess sugar. That’s why starchy foods like breads and grains are so full of energy and is the same reason low-carb diets work as long as you stick with them but fail the instant you start eating carbs again. Very similar to starch is glycogen, which is also made of thousands of glucose monomers except they are arranged in a slightly different manner than they are in starch. Glycogen is the animal form of starch and is basically the middle step between food that is eaten and fat being formed. Lastly is cellulose, which is also a bunch of glucose molecules stuck together in yet another different way and are arranged such that it is extremely difficult to separate the individual monomers from each other. Because of this, cellulose is less of an energy-storing carbohydrate and instead is a structural carbohydrate, being a major component of the cell wall of plants. 

Chapter 2.5.1 Kind of Chemistry, Kind of Biology, Let's Call it Chemology

Fine. It’s Actually Called Biochemistry

This gets to be chapter 2.5 because it’s still a shit ton of chemistry but it’s actually getting into biology (finally) and is important enough to deserve it’s own section. And I’m in charge and I wanted to do it. So while this field is technically called biochemistry, I’m going to stick with calling it chemology because it’s more fun to say and type than the alternative. So onward and upward with chemology!

In the last chapter, we discussed how life is nothing but a bunch of juice sacks interacting with other juice sacks and within that juice, we had solutes dissolved. Now, if we had to keep everything small and simple, life wouldn’t exist. It just wouldn’t. In order to do all the stuff we mentioned in chapter one that is necessary for life, we need some big ass molecules. HUGE molecules. How big are they? These molecules are so big they have to use a boomerang to put their belts on. (I can’t believe I just made a your momma joke about macromolecules...God help us all). They’re so big they get a special name: macromolecules. This literally translates to “large molecules” so bonus points on creativity there. Easiest way to make this stuff make sense is to imagine a paper clip chain or something similar. Maybe just a regular chain. Either way, something made up of a bunch of links. Or a trilogy of movies telling a single story. I could go on and on with analogies if I wanted to get my word count up but I’m trying to keep this concise so we’ll leave it with those two: a chain and a trilogy of films. The entire length of chain, or the full story arc is known as the polymer, meaning many -mers. Each link in the chain, or film in the series, is a monomer, which means, you guessed it, one -mer. Like the films, the monomers in a polymer can be unique things that fit together to create a larger unit (...larger unit...that’s funny) or, like in the chain, they can all be the exact damn thing. So all of these macromolecules we’re going to talk about are the polymer and each is made up of monomers, which themselves could be polymers made of monomers (with me?)

In biology, life is all about opposite but related actions. So if we're going to take the time and effort to create these large molecules, we're eventually going to want to break them apart. That's where the following reactions come in. Now before you get confused, try to keep up. Based on their names, you may be able to figure out that they both involve a water molecule in some way. Dehydration synthesis reactions are how you go from monomers, any monomers, and form a polymer. It's called dehydration not because you're losing a water molecule from the overall reaction (the real mindfuck is that you're actually producing one) but because you're pulling a water out of the reactants. One reactant loses a hydrogen and the other loses a hydroxyl group (remember, that's an oxygen and a hydrogen) and together that forms a water. The opposite process, where you introduce a water to break apart a polymer, with one part gaining a hydrogen and the other the hydroxyl is known as hydrolysis. Hydro meaning water and -lysis from the word to split, so it really makes sense that hydrolysis is splitting with water. This all makes more sense with a picture so hopefully when I actually publish this, it'll have a picture right…..here.

So let's talk about the different macromolecules and we'll start with the most delicious: carbohydrates

Podcast is UP!

It's been decided that a podcast needed to happen. Because everyone has a podcast now I wanted to be like everyone else. The plan for season one is to go through the AP Biology curriculum one chapter at a time until I reach the end. In the show notes for each episode will be a link to a matching powerpoint to really drive home the information

Be on the lookout for Biology for Bastards anywhere you get podcasts in the near future. Available now on Spotify, coming soon to Stitcher, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts,and all those other places where you get to listen to people talk to you. Hopefully this happens in the next day or two but with the weekend...who knows.

In the meantime, visit the website for the podcast here where you can listen to the first couple of episodes.

Ch 2.4: Tripping on Acids and Bases

Speaking of water, if you actually studied chemistry, you’d know that water is sometimes known as the universal solvent. Which means a lot if you know what it says but you probably don’t. Fortunately for you, this book exists. To understand that magical phrase, we first have to dive into the world of solutions. Life is nothing but a bunch of juices sloshing around together in sweet little juice sacks interacting with other juice sacks. Within those juice sacks, you have shit dissolved in water. That’s a solution. You can have a solution with other liquids but in biology, it's pretty much all dissolved in water. Water is the stuff in which the shit dissolves so water is known as a solvent. The shit, that’s known as a solute. You get a solution when you dissolve the solute in the solvent. So water is nicknamed the universal solvent because it can dissolve a whole bunch of shit and should always be the first try when you’re trying to make a solution.

Lots of stuff can be a solute but there are two special types of solutions that can form and those are your acids and bases. For the sake of me not caring and this being biology, we’re going to keep this part as short as possible. Sometimes when you dissolve stuff into solution, the solute breaks apart into charged little particles called ions. If those ions are positively charged hydrogen ions, you get an acid. If they’re negatively charged hydroxide (an oxygen hooked to a hydrogen) ions, you get a base. Using some weird ass math, we can measure how many H+ ions there are in a solution and when we do we get pH. I really hope you’re with me so far because this shit is boring and I’m not repeating myself. So once this pH is determined, we can create a scale from zero to fourteen (weird ass scale, I know). All you have to remember is seven is in the middle (basic counting skills) and the alphabet goes A then B. Start at zero, that’s an acid. When you hit seven (the middle) you change to B (for base). And just like on any scale with two options, the further away from the middle you get, the stronger that option gets. So zero is a strong acid and fourteen is a strong base. Something with a pH of 7.4 (like humans) is slightly basic. That’s right, ya basic. And we’re not going to get into any more detail than that because for life, if you get too far away from 7.4 (and by too far I mean like...7 or 7.9), you die. So there’s that….

Ch 2.3: Chemical Reactions: Bringing the Boom (or Not)

Those valence electrons, hanging out on the outskirts of the atom, those fuckers are the important ones. They maintain the perimeter and they’re going to be the first ones to encounter another atom when they meet one. So when we discuss chemical reactions, what we’re really discussing is the action of one atom’s valence electrons in regards to those of another. Sometimes those interactions can make things go boom, other times they go sizzle, and still other times they seem to do nothing at all. But no matter the type of reaction that is occuring, really the only thing that’s happening is the atoms are rearranging how they’re grouped together. We’re not creating or destroying matter, just mixing it up. Conservation of mass if you want to sound like a smart ass.

We could spend a lifetime talking about chemical reactions and chemical bonds but we’re not because again, Biology for Bastards. Now in order for these reactions to take place, we have to put some energy into it at first. This is known as the activation energy and the best way to think of it is as gambling, which, as bastards, we do. You go to the casino, get the free drinks, and sit down at a machine. You can’t start playing right away, first you have to put money into it. Same thing with reactions. Some reactions are cheap, those are our penny slots, while others take a shit ton of energy to get going and are equivalent to our high rollers. No matter the energy required, you have to get to that amount before the reaction takes place. You can’t have half the energy and get half the reaction, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t play the ten dollar slots if you have five dollars. Just won’t work. Now sometimes, we can get away with cheating and using a catalyst to lower the cost. A catalyst is nothing more than something that speeds up a reaction by lowering the activation energy. It’s like having five dollars in free slot play so now you can do that ten dollar slot machine with your five dollars plus the free play cash.

So we’ve discussed what reactions are and how they happen, so now we have to talk about the types of bonds formed when these reactions take place. I know, chemistry kind of sucks and this shit just goes on and on but you’ll see why we’re focused on this at the end of the chapter (when actual biology starts to happen…). Technically there are three types of bonds but we’re not going to worry about one of them because we’re not robots. So ignoring metallic bonds, we have ionic bonds and covalent bonds. Ionic bonds occur when electrons are fully given up by one atom and fully received by another. On the other hand, covalent bonds occur when the electrons are shared by the two atoms. It’s like child custody: ionic is when one parent fully gives up their parental rights to the other and covalent is joint custody.

Just like joint custody doesn’t have to be even, neither does the sharing of electrons in covalent bonds. Sometimes, one atom ends up with custody of the electrons more than the other and when this occurs, a polar covalent bond is formed. (The opposite of a polar bond is nonpolar...no shit).  They’re called polar because they have a positive end and a negative end, just like a magnet. The negative side is where the electrons tend to hang out more and as a result, the opposite side is a little more positive. Polar bonds are super fucking important in biology because a lot of the elements we deal with (like oxygen…) make polar bonds and as a result, perhaps the most important interactions in biology can occur. What are these nearly mythical interactions that are responsible for keeping your ass alive? Hydrogen bonds. So important they’re called bonds when they aren’t actually sharing or transferring electrons. They’ve been promoted to bond level without doing bond work. They’re hot shit. Hydrogen bonds occur when you get two polar molecules together and the slight negative of one wants to pair up with the slight positive of another. I like to think of them as velcro (hook and loop fasteners if we’re avoiding copyrighted names…) because individually, a hydrogen bond is weak as hell. But when you get a bunch of them together they magically become strong as fuck. Hydrogen bonds help keep proteins together, help your DNA not fall apart and kill you, keep the world from being a giant ball of ice, all sorts of stuff. Like I said, they’re a big fucking deal.

Writer’s Soap Box Moment

You ever just stare at a glass of something with ice in it and wonder why the ice floats? No? Do you realize that the solid of everything else on the planet sinks if you throw it in it’s liquid? Throw a rock into a volcano and it’ll sink. Same thing if you put solid metal into some molten metal, Terminator 2 style, its bye bye T-1000. Not so with water. Water floats on it’s liquid and the way it is able to do so has everything to do with hydrogen bonds. When water is a liquid, the various molecules are drifting past each other fairly quickly, they dont have time to stop and get friendly with their neighboring molecules. But as the temperature drops and they move a little more slowly, they start to notice what’s around them. So around four degrees celsius, a magic event occurs. This is where water is as dense as it will be and as the temperature continues to drop, the molecules begin aligning based on the slightly positive and slightly negative ends and they spread out. Its not dissimilar to being able to tolerate being closer to people when you’re walking through a hallway but you wouldn’t want to be that close to them forever. You’d eventually want to spread out and face your friends. That’s what water does when it freezes and that’s why it floats. Which is a good thing because if it sank, every winter water would freeze and sink, piling up until the entire planet was a giant ice ball. If that happened, we totally we be dead. So thanks hydrogen bonds. 

Change of plans

Hey everyone,

Originally I've been trying to do three blog posts a week: a book post on Monday, an unrelated post on Wednesday, and another book post on Friday. While some weeks that has worked, its a lot for me to take on as a single person and considering I want to start making this a podcast and school starts back up in a month (!) I'm going to have to knock it down to two posts a week, one book and one unrelated. I'm sure you're fine with that and if you aren't, sorry.

On the podcast front, I'm slowly getting that together. Apparently right now its only available on Spotify but I'm working on getting it available everywhere. Once it is, I'll start pushing out episodes.

Until then,

Bastard On.

Biology for Bastards...The Podcast?

DAMN STRAIGHT! We're gonna be a podcast! Episodes coming soon but we'll be available on all the major podcast platforms. Keep an eye out for Biology for Bastards: The Podcast, coming soon!

https://anchor.fm/bioforbastards

Its (Not Quite) Hot as Balls Out

Before we get talking about heat, humidity, and for a very brief time, testicles, one or two housekeeping things.

Thank you to everyone who has looked at this at one point or another. I have over 700 page views, including people from countries all around the world. The top five most bastardly countries are the US (makes sense since that's where I'm from), Germany, Japan, Canada, and Ireland. Once I hit 1,000 page views, I'll do a blog post over something from the top countries for every 100 views I get until I hit 2,000. 

Secondly, if you're a regular reader of this, you're even more awesome and you may want to think of subscribing to the blog. That helps me out and let's me know people like what I'm doing and its not just random people each time. Once I get some followers, I'll put up a contact form for post suggestions.

But enough of that shit, let's talk balls.

Today is going to be a hot one here. High of 91*F or almost 33*C for my Non-Americans. That's hot but not quite hot as balls. By balls I mean testicles. Human testicles. 91*F/33*C degrees is not hot as balls. Mainly because balls like to be 95*F/35*C degrees. This is why in humans, the testicles are located in the scrotum which can pull the balls closer to the body if it's cold or lower the balls if its hot. Being internal is not an option because, as most of us know, body temperature is 98.6*F/37*C. Too hot for balls. It would cook the sperm. And I don't know about you, but cooked sperm does not sound like a good thing to me. 

But what is hot? We all know when something is hot or something is cold, but do we really know what heat is? Maybe, if you're smart. Probably not otherwise. Heat is this measure of how much thermal energy an atom or molecule has; the more energy, the more heat. But heat doesn't mean temperature because temperature is actually an average of all the heat of all the atoms present in the substance. Have you ever thought about how when you see a puddle of water, the water can evaporate even if its temperature is below boiling? That's because random molecules in the water can have enough heat to become a gas without the entire substance being at a high temperature. Crazy, right? 

So heat is just how much energy it has and temperature is the average of all the heats. Want to hear something even crazier? 

Cold doesn't exist. Cold is literally just a lack of heat. So when you put ice in a drink, the drink doesn't become colder, the ice gets hotter and steals away the energy from your drink, making the temperature of the drink drop. I know, some people are like "whaaaaaaaaat?" and I have to admit, its one of the coolest parts of non-biology for me. But this is exactly why you can't cool your house down by leaving the refrigerator open. In order to work, the fridge pulls heat out of the fridge and blows it away, which is why there's always hot air being blown from the fridge. It's not cooling stuff off, its un-heating it by heating the air around the appliance. 

Now, I originally wanted to discuss humidity too but to be honest, relative humidity confuses me and that's what they refer to on the news or whatever. It has something to do with the comparison of how much water vapor is in the air and the amount necessary for it be saturated, which means the air couldn't hold any more water vapor. But I don't know how they figure out that magic second number. What I do know is that humidity + high temperature = garbage. That's because when the humidity gets high, we don't cool off as easily because it fucks with our system of cooling -- sweating. Sweating is a type of evaporative cooling, and it works on the principles I've already talked about in this post. When you sweat, some of the sweat is going to evaporate because individual molecules have enough heat, just like in the puddle. When those molecules evaporate, some of the heat in your body goes with it, cooling you off. But if the air is already full of moisture, this evaporation isn't going to work as well. The air already has its hands full dealing with the water already there, it's not able to deal with your nasty ass sweat, so your sweat stays on your body and you stay hot. 

So there you have it, the difference between heat and temperature, why humidity sucks, and the proper temperature to be able to say "its hot as balls" and not be scientifically inaccurate. To restate the really important one of those, 95*F/35*C are the magic numbers for balls. 

Ch 2.2: Periodic Table Time

When you look at the periodic table, You’ll always see at least two numbers for each element listed. The smaller number is known as the atomic number and as easily seen, it goes one, two, three, all the way to one hundred eighteen as you move across and then down the table. More on what the atomic number is in five sentences. The other number (the bigger one) is the atomic mass. It’s usually some number followed by some decimal points (something like 12.01 in the case of carbon) and what that number represents is the weighted average of the atomic masses of the isotopes of that element. Lots of science words but stay with me as we work backwards through that sentence. An element is the most fundamental type of atom. Each element has a distinct number of protons, and that number of neutrons is what the other number on the periodic table tells us. Going back to carbon (because its a dope element and super important, more on that shortly), it has an atomic number of six, which means EVERY SINGLE ATOM of carbon in the fucking UNIVERSE has six protons. Let me say that again but in a different way because its super fucking important -- if any atom in the entire known and unknown universe has six protons, it HAS to be carbon. I screwed these last two sentences up the first time I wrote this because I was doing it at eight in the morning on a Saturday and accidentally wrote twelve (which is carbon’s mass) but carbon can’t have twelve protons because if an atom had twelve protons, it would be magnesium. Back to the good ol’ peanut M&M analogy, every single peanut M&M has to have a peanut at its center because otherwise it wouldn’t be a peanut M&M.

Just like the candy, which can have a bigger or smaller nut (insert joke from two paragraphs ago), carbon can have a bigger or smaller nucleus. How does this happen? By changing the number of neutrons. When you compare two atoms and they have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons, they are what’s known as isotopes. Carbon has a bunch of different isotopes but some of the more famous ones are carbon-12, carbon-11, and carbon-14. Writing their names like this, with the element’s name followed by a number, we can actually get a lot of information if we’re smart enough to understand what the hell is going on. The word carbon tells us six protons because carbon’s atomic number is six and atomic number = number of protons. The numbers eleven, twelve, and fourteen tell us the atomic mass of that isotope, which is something we actually discussed earlier when the idea of the atomic nucleus was introduced. If you already forgot what you read three paragraphs ago, the nucleus of an atom contains all the protons and neutrons, so the atomic mass is equal to the number of protons (in this case, six) plus the number of neutrons. Carbon-11 has six protons and five neutrons. Carbon-12 still has six protons but this version of carbon has six neutrons, giving a mass of twelve. Lastly for this example, carbon-14 has, you guessed it, six protons and eight neutrons.

Also for each element, you’d have to be super dumb to not notice that every element has an abbreviation. Some are (hopefully) super obvious like C for carbon, H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, etc, but others, like those for potassium and lead, are definitely not obvious. Potassium is K, from the latin word for alkali (kali) which came from an arabic word meaning “plant ashes” People back in the day would burn trees to create potash, which is a substance used both as fertilizer and in the making of cement, and that’s why we abbreviate potassium with a K. The abbreviation for lead, Pb, is from the Latin word plumbum which means, oddly enough, lead.

The last thing related to the periodic table I want to talk about is how the number of valence electrons change as you move sideways across the table. Each column is called a group and starting in group one, with hydrogen, you have one valence electron. Group two has two, then things get fucked up in the middle and that’s another something for Chemistry for Bastards to cover, then group three has three valence electrons etc all the way until you get to group eight. What makes this important is the fact that atoms with the same number of valence electrons will tend to react the same. What do I mean by react? Well…

USA = Un-Sucky Amniotes!

Happy Birthday United States!

(Ignore how terrible the country is being ran right now...its a rough patch. Think those awkward tween years when you're in middle school and think you know everything but you're actually a shithead no one likes to be around. That's us right now)

In honor of the United States of America's birthday, I present to you the alternative USA = Un-Sucky Amniotes!

What the fuck is an amniote you might ask? Short version: A mammal, a bird, or a reptile. Long science version: its any organism that develops within an amnion, which is an enclosed, fluid-filled sac. This is best experienced by humans when a pregnant woman's water breaks. That "water" is the amniotic fluid of the developing child. When I first developed my list, I didn't seek out to do a cute acronym or only include amniotes, it just worked out that way (mainly because I'm THAT awesome). These animals are native to the USA and make them USA's USAs. So let's get to it. The top four (in honor of the Fourth of July) Un-Sucky Amniotes in the United States of America.

Honorable mention: The Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) 

Doesn't get a full write up but Benjamin Franklin loved them, they're delicious, they CAN fly, and sometimes they make babies with themselves. So that's cool.

Number 4: American Bison (Bison bison)

These badasses used to be EVERYWHERE but stupid white Europeans came over and almost hunted them to extinction. But being the badasses they are, they recovered and aren't even listed as endangered. Growing up to six feet (1.8 meters) tall and weighing up to a ton (900 kg), they're essentially a truck that can run you over if they wanted to. But they're chill. But could easily fuck you up if they wanted. They're like if Dwayne Johnson was an animal.

Also...they're delicious too.

Number 3: Gila Monster (Heloderma suspectum)

First off, that species name. *Chef's Kiss*
Second, they're venomous and that makes them awesome.
Third, how many animals have their own movies?
Fourth, they live in the desert so immediately, that makes them hard.

Number 2: Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

Now I know what you're thinking, "How the hell could the bald eagle, America's symbol and an animal capable of ripping you apart in a few different ways be number two???" Good question. Bald eagles are intense. Six foot (roughly 1.8 meters) wing span, giant nests, killer of lots of stuff, they're hardcore. But at one point, America threatened them and they almost went extinct (I'm sure I'll talk pesticides and DDT at some point). So that was a point off in my book and the reason they're number two.


NOW, here it is, the most Un-Sucky Amniote in the United States of America:

Number 1: Virginia Opossum (Didelphis virginiana)

Anyone who knows me should have known this was coming. See this blog post for lots of info but the opossum is how America should be. Ridding the world of disease, surviving injuries that will kill most other things, immune to attacks, chill as fuck. That's the USA I want to live in.

WTF is Medical Air?

I'm not going to lie, this post kind of sucks. No pun intended, because medical air blows.

So here's how this question came to be and eventually led to me writing a crappy post because its air.  I have a friend who has been kicking cancer's ass for a little while but in going full Uma Thurman from Kill Bill on her cancer cells, we've spent a lot of time in the hospital, either taking her to chemo or visiting her. On one such visit, I saw something that confused the hell out of me: Medical Air

I know what oxygen is, I know air, but WTF makes air medical?

Along the wall was an nozzle for something listed as medical air. What. The. Fuck. Medical air? I thought we were over this whole miasma thing and had been for awhile but apparently not. So it turns out, medical air is actually kind of super important. That being said, its description (and therefore this post) is very short.

Medical air is a combination of two gasses: nitrogen and oxygen. It is 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. That's it. That's medical air.

Thanks for reading and tune in next week...

Just kidding, I'm going into a little more detail but not much. That concentration of gasses, 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, its pretty much the same as regular atmospheric air but what makes medical air special is what's not there. There are no contaminants, no "other" gasses like carbon dioxide, methane, argon, whatever, and the amount of moisture in it is carefully regulated. This makes it ideal for people who are in a bad place or are immunocompromised (like people going through chemo...). If you've ever gone to an area of a hospital where things were under positive pressure, what was happening was medical air was being pumped into the room so it was at a slighter higher pressure than the surrounding area, ideally keeping "bad air" away and only supplying the "good air" to the patients.

Medical air is also used a lot in operating rooms, both as something that is given to patients as part of the mixing of gasses in anesthesia and used to power any pneumatic tools the surgeon may use as part of the operation. It's standardized ingredients and cleanliness make it extremely valuable in these cases.

So that's actually the end. Short post because its still air. Not much to say. But because it's such a short post be on the look out TOMORROW for a special BONUS post all about 'MERICA in honor of the Fourth of July!

Ch 2.1 Atoms: They Make Up Everything (I Went There)

I get it, you came here for biology and now I’m all “SURPRISE! Chemicals mother fuckers!” but at the heart of it all, biology is chemistry. We don’t have giant explosions but life is an endless series of chemical reactions that just so happen to make something alive. Its bonkers to think about because every single thing in the universe is made of the exact same three things: protons, neutrons, and electrons. No shit. Whatever you’re sitting on is nothing but protons, neutrons, and electrons. Same with your clothes (I’m assuming you’re wearing clothes because if you’re not, you’re seriously messed up. Put some clothes on you weirdo). Same with the air you’re breathing and same with you. The only difference between your underwear and you is how those three tiny ass little things are arranged around each other. Put them together one way and you have your tighty whities, rearrange them, add some more of one and a couple of another, combine them with their friends and you get the ass that is covered by those Fruit of the Looms.

Together, protons, (usually) neutrons, and electrons make up the basic unit of matter, the atom. At the center of the atom is the nucleus (this word will show up again later, but in a different sense) and this is where you find the protons and neutrons. Together, these two components give the atom pretty much all of its properties with an important exception we’ll get to in a short bit. If you ask a chemist, they’d say that protons and neutrons are a difference size but for biology, they’re close enough. Equal in size, equal in mass, pretty much equal in every aspect but charge. That’s because protons are positive and neutrons are, hopefully you guessed this, neutral. So protons give the nucleus a charge while the neutrons add to its size. Think of an M&M; at the center of the candy is whatever we use to define the type. If its a peanut at the center its a peanut M&M, if it has a pretzel core then it is a pretzel M&M. I like to use to peanut M&Ms as an example because not only are they the best M&M type, the PeaNut reminds me of Proton and Neutron. Protons determine the peanut, neutrons determine how big of a nut it has (there is a joke to be made here about big nuts...I’ll let you have that one).

All that being said, there’s always two other ingredients to an M&M that we haven’t discussed -- the chocolate and the candy shell. This is a biology book so we won’t get into crazy detail about electron orbital shapes and all that crap but I will discuss the importance of the cloud and valence electrons. If you already know what those two things are either you’re a chemist trying to brush up on biology or you have absolutely no reason to be reading this book. Either way, good for you I guess. Surrounding the peanut is a relatively thick ring of chocolate, and this is analogous to where our third atomic particle, the electron, is found. In the atom, this thickened area where you can find the electrons are known as the electron cloud because the electrons are somewhere within that area. We won’t get into why the word somewhere is emphasized in that last sentence in this book but hey, that’s what “High School Chemistry for Bastards” is for, right? Anyway with the candy, the chocolate and the nut are close to the same size but in reality, the area where electrons are found make up the vast majority of the atom and since the universe is made of atoms, most of the universe is empty space. Mind=Blown.

Last anatomy-of-an-atom (or should I say...an-ATOM-y...dad jokes for days this chapter) topic is what the hell the candy shell is for. Yes, the shell is candy. No, its not chocolate. Yes, I’m sure. Imagine lightly closing your hand around a bunch of M&Ms and waiting a minute or two before opening your hand and dumping them out. What do you expect to see on your hand? The reason your hand looks all rainbow is because the outer candy layer protected the chocolate within. Back to the atom analogy, the candy shell is the same as valence electrons, which is just a fancy science way of saying “the electrons on the outside.” The valence electrons are going to be big shit later, just sit tight...

Ch 1.4 Life is Complicated

Now that all that crap is out of the way, let’s kind of talk biology. This stuff is the dumbed down, introduction stuff that really doesn’t say much at all but just outlines all the other shit we’re going to talk about for the next bunch of pages. So what the hell makes something alive? A heartbeat? Cells? DNA? Who the hell knows? Science, that’s who. So we’re going to run through the basic fundamentals of life and in order to be considered alive, you (or whatever we’re looking at) has to have all of them. You don’t have one or more of them, tough shit, not alive (sorry viruses). So let’s do this is the least painful way possible: a list.

• Made of cells

Cells are the basic building blocks of life. You have to be at least one cell but can be trillions. When an organism consists of a shit ton of cells, typically they combine a bunch of them into a tissue, a bunch of tissues into an organ, and a bunch of organs into an organ system. All the organ systems make the final organism. 

• Use Material and Energy 

This is metabolism. Materials are the things that build life (Spoiler: you’re made of dinosaur shit) and energy is what powers it. That’s it for this one…

• Respond to the environment

By environment, we mean anything that isn’t the organism. This could be heat, light, sound, chemicals, a knife, whatever. You shiver when you’re cold to warm up, your pee changes colors when your body is low on water, pupils change size depending on how bright the light is, etc. I could go on but if you don’t get it by now, sorry. Those are all responses

• Grow and develop

Growing and developing are two different, albeit (BOOM! Got to use that word) similar, things. Growing simply means getting larger or increased in numbers. No real changes are happening, it's really just an increase in volume. Developing is the process of becoming more complex over time. A lot of times, development happens at the same time that growth is occurring but they don’t have to overlap. They just tend to do so.

• Reproduce

THE SEX! Or the NO SEX! Either way, life has to make more life. We like to talk about sexual reproduction when you have two parental cells combining to form the new individual but asexual reproduction is also a thing. In asexual reproduction you don’t bump uglies and you just have one parent making a genetically identical copy of itself. (NOTE: this is going to come up a bunch but when we throw “a” or “an” in front of a word in biology, it means without. So asexual literally means without sex.)

• Evolve

For right now, we can define evolution as “the change in a population over time” but that is a very simplified definition and we are definitely going to dive into it a hell of a lot more in a later chapter. 

• Ecological Impact

Another obvious-once-you-think-of-it characteristic is that life is going to affect the environment. Earlier it was said that life has to be able to respond to changes in the environment but in its response, life is going to change the environment. It could be by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by exhaling, more moisture to the air when you sweat, whatever, but every life form will affect its environment. It’s impossible for life to exist entirely by itself.  

So there you go, all the requirements of life. With that, we’ve covered the basics of science, how we measure shit, the way we do what we do in science and lastly, why life is so fucking complicated. But this is the introduction to the show. Shit is about to get REAL. So in the words of Samuel L. Jackson, hold onto your butts.

Why Dogs are Scientifically Adorable as Hell

As I was perusing the internet recently, I came across all these articles talking about "puppy dog eyes" and why your dog can make that face that makes your heart melt and you end up sharing your pizza with your four-legged friend. I was curious so I hunted down the actual paper (authored by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows) to read because you can never trust blogs (except for this one). Let's dive into it.

We all know dogs are awesome and better than cats (sorry cat people). Part of it is that dogs are so damn expressive and just love you no matter what. Cats on the other hand have resting bitch face and couldn't give two fucks about you (or so it seems). But why do dogs make people feel all warm and fuzzy and the feline fuckers don't? No clue, this post isn't about cat, its about dogs. More importantly, its about doggy eyebrows.  

Now, dogs and humans have had a solid 33,000 years to really solidify any relationship between the two species. As a result of this time, dogs have gotten really good at reading cues that humans give them, whether its pointing at something (I do this all the time with my foot when I drop food on the floor, the dog just goes to it) or even just looking in a direction. Furthermore, have you ever noticed that when your doggo can't figure something out, they look at you with that face and you have to go help them? Yea, wolves don't do that. So something magical has happened in that 33,000 years to really form a link between dogs and humans.

Enter oxytocin. Oxytocin is nicknamed the love hormone because it makes you feel really good and smushy when you see something cute. Its the same hormone that gets released when moms look at babies. Interestingly (weird word to type), the exact same process happens when humans look into the eyes of dogs AND when dogs lock gazes with humans. So when a human looks at a dog, they get happy and when a dog looks at a human, the dog gets happy. Then a loop starts where dog looks at human, human at dog, dog back at human, human back at dog, and all the while both are just falling deeper in love with each other. Additionally, humans love puppy-looking dogs. Floppy ears, big eyes, big ol noggins, those are all puppy traits and some of the most popular dogs (think Golden Retrievers) just look like over-sized puppies.

FANCY SCIENCE TIME: When an organism retains juvenile traits into adulthood, that organism is known as a paedomorph. Paedo- from the Greek meaning boy or child and -morph meaning shape or form. No one knows where morph came from..

Image from TAP

This is where the actual paper goes into a lot of detail about dog face anatomy and data collecting procedures, all of which I find to be pretty interesting but you may not so if you think that would be cool, I highly recommend checking out the actual paper (I think from now on, I'm going to abbreviate "the actual paper" as TAP). The results of some dog and wolf face dissections, as well as video recordings, led to the following conclusion: dogs have this magic muscle that wolves don't called the levator anguli oculi medialis, abbreviated LAOM. This magic muscle allows doggos to raise their inner eyebrows, resulting in an eyebrow shape that resembles that look you get right before you cry. But it gets better.

Humans get a lot of information from each other from eyebrow movements, even when you don't realize it. That's one of the hypotheses for why we still have eyebrows even though we've lost most of the rest of our body hair (at least some people...there are some hairy mother fuckers out there). Dogs, having this extra muscle that wolves don't, are able to have much more expressive faces than other critters, with eyebrows moving as much as Nathan Lane (for the older crowd) or Emilia Clarke (for the Millennials). 

Not only have we bred dogs together that led to the formation of a muscle that lets dogs make sad faces, when they lift their little eyebrows, it makes them look even more puppy-like (which we've already talked about the oxytocin cycle). Even better, it shows more of the whites of their eyes (FANCY SCIENCE TIME: whites of the eyes are known as sclera) and its been shown that the more sclera an organism has, the more humans like it. That's why googly eyes are so cute. 

Basically, to sum things up, dogs have a muscle that wolves and some other animals don't that let them make sad faces, which makes them look like puppies, and make their eyes more trusting. Even shorter of a summary: