H1N1 and a new sch term

new sch term starts tomorrow. all schs including mine were busy settling students travel history and status of health over the past week. trs were busy settling home-based learning lesson plans and worksheets for students on 1 week Leave of Absence. on friday, my sch had abt 10 trs on 1 week LoA, who didnt attend the staff mtg. in fact, that was the shortest and most concise mtg ever held. most will be returning this week.

though this isnt a joke, truth is, we are wondering which sch will be the first to report a cluster breakout.

i was supposed to bring students to RP last friday. they won the outstanding award for their research. and im personally sad they didnt get to present their project in front of hundreds. RP’s cluster numbers are over 20, and they are on e-learning. a number of cluster cases sprung up at Tekong and Maju and clementi camp. im actually quite disappointed.

i remember telling my class, “Singapore is fantastic you know. because we tackled the SARS situation so well, we are already fully prepared for a possible outbreak. temperature check points are already up at all airports and entry/exit points and hospitals and i believe the govt will do their best to make sure swine flu doesnt enter our country” yep. that was before swine flu was termed influenza A. and subsequently H1N1.

how did we let the numbers hit 599? thats alot. and i feel betrayed.

over the past 1.5 months, the term social responsibility hasnt just been used in schs. i tell my students to be socially responsible. but there are other ppl who havent. not to blame them, cos i understand that the symptoms might not show until after a few days. by then, ppl might have visited communities of ppl.

i think what made this situation bad is that once infected ppl go out, it isnt going to be easy to do contact tracing. thats how the numbers plumetted.

so while Presbytarian High closes for a week, what remains to be seen is how many new cases spring up in the first week of sch.

many students asked me why MOE doesnt want to hold off the reopening of the sch for another week. “well, that would mean that your sep hols will be gone isnt it? do you really think we are going to shorten 10 weeks into 9 weeks!” i rebutted.

truth is, the numbers are only going to rise over the next few days/weeks, so putting off the reopening for a week will not justify the reopening of sch when the number of cases are higher. besides, AYG starts at the same time. if sch’s close, how can AYG go on?

or maybe we would. cos we have an international responsibility to ensure that Singapore is fully capable of delivering her ends of the deal by completing the program without much compromises. deal with it.

twice daily temp taking, masks, bla bla bla (not at liberty to say)………. monday’s going to be busy, until we clear at least 1 week of no cases in my sch, in my view. by then, at least we can be sure that none of our students brought The Hini (as it is fondly called among us) back to singapore.

 

another wonderful creature – salps

is this amazing or what!!!!!

upright version

or a coiled up version?

wanna see its length?

and even longer….

thats called salps. and if i ever ever get the chance to spot one, that’ll make my day, year, forever!

they are tunicates, and can be seen as a single organism or in chains like the last few pics.

actually i dont think these things are hard to find. seems that all they need are phytoplanktons and if there’s flourishing phytoplankton, they will just bud off all day long, producing many baby salps.

but because they feed by taking in water through their gelatinous body and filter off food, they can get overloaded if the phytoplankton is too dense.

anyway, they also reproduce sexually. and!!!!! salps have 2 genders! called hermaphrodites right. the young salps first mature as females and then the older they get, they become males. so sexual reproduction in salps involves the older males (which were once females) fertilizing the younger females!

and why are salps important? because their faeces are a major contribution to the carbon concentration in the ocean.

arent there other creatures that do that?  im sure they are, but i’d still love to have these salps in the ocean!

 

a joke on a joke – sry MJ

aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahaha… if you watch David Caruso in CSI Miami, you’ll know why this is ultimately hilarious!

RIP MJ.

 

stop finning shark

a number of you might remember this lady (Alice Newstead), sending a msg to stop finning sharks.

took me a few yrs to bother searching on finned sharks. almost had tears.

not that im a vegetarian. i do eat meat. i do eat seafood. i guess the idea here is to eat things can be grown at a sustainable rate?

i stopped eating sharks fin 4 yrs ago. so i guess i dont feel as guilty seeing these images. but ppl do eat shark meat as well dont they.

Hammer head shark with no fins. how sad is this. really. i think its really sad. from the bottom of my heart. :’(

 

life on mars

you know, seriously, what we know abt the history of the earth is so recent. there’s been so much happening before we came to understand life on earth.

who’s to know whether there was life on mars, and whether they were destroyed by the time humans evolved. we spent hundreds of years learning abt the history of the earth. wouldnt we take longer to find out abt the history of mars.

forget abt the geometric patterns that appear on the surface. ppl tend to look for patterns just to make sense of random points.

but fact is, there is water beneath the surface of mars. where there’s water, there will be life. in fact, there was water on the surface as well. with signs of erosion of past river deltas.

there has to be life. why wouldnt there be? hydrogen-based organisms, copper-eating organisms, methane-breathing organisms. if not methane-releasing organisms. it is all a possibility right?

but lets not be all childish and too over dramatic. we shouldnt be looking for martians. perhaps microorganisms. perhaps its taking a longer time for civilisation to evolve on mars. maybe because temperature isnt ideal yet. maybe it needs to be warmer, maybe cooler. who knows. but thats life as we know it. maybe life came, and died.

like earth, mars might be going through cold and warm phases. when it does reach the warm phase, we could see rain on mars. and water brings life. it just happens.

but then again, the term alien is might not be too far fetched. if biological life did exist millions of yrs ago, they could have evolved faster than us. but they might not have evolved like us.

language, speech, habits, culture, etc all come abt with interactions with one another in an attempt to create a way of life. biological life on mars could have come up with another way of life. afterall evolution is very much dependant on environmental conditions..  

and perhaps, they too realised that they were losing their world, (too cold perhaps), and might look for alternative places to live, just like what earth’s scientists are doing today. they too might come to earth to get soil samples. (and maybe a number of human samples)

interesting eh…

mars might show us what earth could have been a few millions yrs ago. or mars might show us what earth could become a few millions yrs later.

 

a cell from 120000 yrs ago

called Herminiimonas glaciei.

its a purplish brown bacteria that was found nearly 3000m below surface ice in Greenland. they took the cells, and spent 1 yr trying to get it to reproductive state by gradually increasing incubation temperature. for 1 yr. 1 yr.

seems that now the bacteria is colonising in nutrient agar. and scientists are studying the cell.

H. glaciei were able to survive because they are extremely small. smaller than the bacteria we normally work with. abt 50 times smaller than E. coli.

so they were able to embed in really tight and small cracks in the ice, that allow a really really really thin film of water to stream through. cracks so small that an E. coli wont fit into that space.

plus, they were kept so cool for so long, they probably needed like really really minute amounts of nutrients. metabolism would have bee really minimal. how could they even be resurrected?

special eh.

so, perhaps we will find organisms in colder planets one day.

but thats not the important thing.

i will be writing abt this one day, so wait for it. you see, the earth underwent cycles of warm and cool periods, each lasting 100000s of years. fundamentally, we evolved because of the warmer period. ice ages happened in the cooler phase of Earth’s history.

when the earth does become warmer, it is likely that the ice caps will fully melt. perhaps these unfound micro-micro organisms (ultramicroorganisms) will be resurrected. and maybe we’ll see a whole new lot of scientific developments. maybe a whole new range of diseases. and possibly a whole new medical developments.

isnt it great.

well, we have another 15000-50000yrs before the next ice age comes, so…

here are other old cells if you want to read abt them..

8 million yrs old

750000 yrs old – found in tibet (cant find a link)

 

the loveliest dragon!

isn’t she lovely…

came across it in deviantart.

its a leafy sea dragon!

for those who dont want to read all that stuff in wiki, here’re the snipets of it..

they are actually fishes, related to sea horses. those leafy things are actually skin, and makes the look like a seaweed. yep, you guessed it right. for camouflage purposes.

this creature can even change its colour, depending on various factors (diet, age, stress level).

the long nose like thing is its mouth, used for eating small fish and shrimps.

i would like to mention its reproductive ways, but believe me, there’s a whole big story to it. just like the seahorses, so i shall put it on another post.

sea dragons are becoming endangered, otherwise, already are. pls leave them in their natural habitat, do not collect living specimens of sea dragons and other marine animals.

 

colugo

thats a flying lemur. and thats the animal in the post below. thanks to someone who commented.

did you know there were only abt 1500 colungos in singapore. so i guess we were lucky to have spotted one. they are native to SEA.

colugos are vegetarians and are shy and nocturnal. they are like kangaroos, the young clings on to the mom until its ready to venture out. the moms dont have a pouch though. they use the extra skin and tail to create a casing to house the young.

here’s actually a gliding colugo.

do check out the last website url budak gave in his comment. its sad, that ppl want to harm a harmless creature.

 

some sort of flabby tree-climbing animal

is this a flying squirrel???

i have no idea. my students were the first to spot it during a fieldtrip at bt timah last month.

it looks like its too big to be a flying squirrel. but i think its definitely something that glides. all that extra skin btwn its appendages must be used for something isnt it…

 

Cicada rain….

heard of it before, never seen it. but had the chance to experience it with a bunch of 30 students at labrador park on 18th april. a first for all of us!

student:  Cher, its raining…!

me: eh…  doesnt look like it.. why is it so noisy?

me: OMG!!! its cicadas!!! its cicada rain!!!!!!!

student: what does that mean?

me: thats cicada’s peeing on you guys!!! get under the shelter!

student (after 5 min): how come cicada so small can contain so much pee? how come they can pee continuously for so long? is it really pee? will it smell? why do they make so much noise when they pee?

so here’s what i found out.  its actually not cicada peeing. its plant sap. you see, cicadas pierce into the stems and suck out the nutrient rich food. whatever extra fluid is secreted from their butt/back/end… and i think it’s not even processed, so you cant consider it pee. 

male cicadas make really high pitched loud sounds, acts as a deterrent to birds that eat these insects. cicada’s also use these as warning sounds and for mating purposes, as you may have already guessed. typical animal stuff.  but to ensure that one species mate with the same species (cos there are 2500 species of cicadas), they each have distinguishable sounds, which the human ear may not be able to differentiate.

crickets are often mistaken for cicadas. i dont quite know how to recognise the differences yet. but i know the sounds we usually hear in nature reserves are cicadas.

anyway, just in case you cant see, here’s a zoomed in version. and i did not photoshop my photo. (trust sony)

btw, tidechasers wrote something abt labrador cicada rain, and here’s what you can do with a DSLR. check out their pics, they are far better than mine! you can even see the cicadas lined on the trees. cool.

and in case you dont know what cicadas look like, here’s a dead one.

plus, check out cicada moulting.