I gave a presentation on the Industrial Revolution, talking about the various inventions like the Seed Drill, Flying Shuttle, Spinning Jenny, Cotton Gin and James Watt’s steam engine and how these inventions brought production of goods out of the home and into the factory. We also talked about trains and how they reduced travel time for goods and people.
I had given my students an optional art assignment to color a butterfly/moth so that it blends in with its surroundings, like the moths in England during the Industrial Revolution. I got two back, the one at the top of this post and the following. The students did a great job and if I had tried to find these hidden butterflies in my house, I’m not sure I would have seen them.
I gave my students an update on the efforts to test a vaccine for the cornona virus, in particular the Oxford Vaccine Trial which started this past week. This vaccine developed at the Jenner Institute has been shown to be effective in monkeys and they hope to have 6000 people in the next trial. They will be injecting half the people with the corona virus vaccine and the other half with a childhood vaccine and then track their progress over the next few months to see if there is a difference in the number of people in each group that contract the disease. This is not a challenge trial, where they would purposely expose the people to the vaccine.
My son is a student at Montana State University and their Honor College had a seminar last Friday by Cassia Wagner, a former MSU student who is now in a Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of Washington. She gave a presentation on their work using the genomes of the cornona virus to track how its spreading around the world. Ms. Wagner was nice enough to share her slides so I gave my students a simplified summary of her talk. They have the genomes for over 11,000 virus samples, from around the world (59 different countries). As the virus spreads and copies itself, errors or mutations occur in its genome and by looking at those mutations and how the samples differ they are able to map out a phylogenetic tree for the virus. You can look at their data on the nextstrain.org website. I put a screenshot up above. The purple dots are samples from China, the greenish/yellow dots/lines indicate Europe and the red dots and lines are for North (red) & South (more orange) America. The x-axis is time, so on the far left of the chart there are only purple lines, showing the virus began spreading in China. In February we see some red dots/lines near the bottom of the chart which are samples from Washington State and by comparing the genomes they can tell that virus came directly from China, its more similar to the China samples than the ones in Europe. You can use the Clock option on their tree and map and watch the virus spread from China to Europe and North America and then spread from those centers.
To help my students understand how this works, I took a phylogentic tree activity (Bioinformatics with pen and paper: building a phylogenetic tree) for primates and relabeled the strings of DNA for different viruses and had the students compare the different samples to see which ones were more closely related and draw their own phylogenetic tree.
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