Toni's Science CSI Blog
My science homework
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
my opinion
The genes that are put in gm foods can transfer into humans and may harm us with eating these foods we may be harming not only us but the world
As these foods are mass produced the machinery that goes into the watering ,fertilising (ect.) these plants could be destroying he planet by all of the co2 emissions that are being let off when we could easily put abit of elbow grease in and there we are a mini supermarket in your own home. And on top of that theres always petrol to get the products to the shops itself and then most people drive a car to the supermarket aswell so theres more co2 and were all thinking why isnt the world already DEAD!!!
So i think gm foods should not be manufactured because of the main reasons up there and because of a lot more that ive found in doing this project
love from toni elizabeth apedaile x<3
why are gm foods grown
Also it is used to keep up with the growing population as these crops are mass produced the sheer amount of these can mean that there will always be vegtables,fruit ect.
these foods are sometimes enriched with certain vitamins and minerals so they can be better for you.
these crops are also mass protected so they are protected against pests.
advantages and disadvantages of gm foods
advantages of GM foods are
they cope better with unnormal condtions or conditions that are unsuitable
produce more crops and a better yield
gm foods use less fertilisers and also less water
they have a better pest resistance
better herbicide tolerance
provides more food which in return feeds the growing population
disadvantages of gm foods are
there harmful to the enviroment
harmful to humans
make numbers of superweeds rise
these superweeds then take over fields and crops
genes from the gm foods may get onto pests they then are immune to the pesticides which means that strongers ones are needed which maybe really harmful
with all of these good points it seems that GM foods are the way forward but with all these bad points is it really worth the hassle?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Pictures of genetically modified foods
Gm Foods
These foods are or have been modified and artificially in laboratory's by scientists.
Before something would be breed or you would test different things and see how well they do , the thing that did well would be used again and again and again until the only thing left would be the thing that did well. Say if you wanted to breed bulldogs it is most likely people want them for looks and the more rings of fat they have the more better they are supposed to look as these dogs are usually on crufts dog show now, so to make more money people are breeding better dogs that people want for shows and now not many bulldogs are left that used to look like they did 20 years ago.
But now scientists have found a quicker and easier way to do this by injecting specific genes into the plant or animal instead of the trail and error process.
These foods and animals that have been genectically modified are put in shows all around the world, crufts for dogs , giantest vegtable and many other shows like this.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
Case Study : Raman Raghav-The Indian Serial Killer
Homeless people were hit to death while they slept. All the murders took place at night and were committed by using a hard, blunt object. The Mumbai police and the media realised that a serial killer was operating in the city.
At the time a suspicious looking man found loitering in the area had been picked up by the police. His name was Raman Raghav, a homeless man, and he was already in police files, having spent 5 years in prison for robbery. However, as no hard evidence could be found against him (none of the survivors had seen this man) the police let him go.When the killer struck again in 1968 the police launched a manhunt for him. Ramakant Kulkarni, then the Deputy Commissioner of Police CID (Crime)took over the investigation and created a massive combing operation in the city. This time the police not only managed to nab him, they got him to confess.
He admitted that he had killed 23 people in 1966 along the GIP (Great Indian Peninsular Railway as the Central Railway (India) was then known) line and almost a dozen in 1968 in the suburbs. However, it is likely that he killed many more. It was his casual approach to killing that led the police to suspect that he did not remember the exact number of people he had killed.
During the time Raman Raghav was in operation, there was widespread public anxiety and panic in Mumbai. People in slums and apartments dreaded sleeping out in the open or with open windows and balconies.
They found out it was him from pictures of witnesses.
For a long time, Raghav refused to answer questions. However, he began to answer their questions after the police fulfilled his request for dishes of chicken to eat. He then gave a detailed explanation, describing his weapon and other things like this.
Things that he said in his interveiws:
That there are two distinct worlds, the world of *'Kanoon' and this world in which he lived.
A fixed and unshakable belief that people were trying to change his sex, but that they are not successful, because he was a representative of *'Kanoon'.
A fixed and unshakable belief that he is a power or 'Shakti'.
A firm belief that other people are trying to put homosexual temptations in his way so that he may succumb and get converted to a woman.
That homosexual intercourse would convert him into a woman.
That he was "101 percent man". He kept on repeating this.
A belief that the government brought him to Mumbai to commit thefts and made him commit criminal acts.
An unshakable belief that there are three governments in the country - the Akbar Government, the British Government, and the Congress Government and that these Governments are trying to persecute him and put temptations before him."
*Kanoon-God
Raman Raghav's sentence was reduced to life imprisonment because he was found to be incurably mentally ill. He was lodged at Yerwada jail, Pune, and was under treatment at the Central Institute of Mental Health and Research. When a panel of doctors who examined him at the directive of the High Court found that he would never be cured, the High Court reduced his sentence to life imprisonment in its judgement of 4th August 1987. A few months later Raghav died at Sassoon Hospital. He had been suffering from kidney trouble.
Raman was India's worst serial killer and even had a movie made about him
This is the end of my report next week im going on my first proper investigation and im sure these facts will come in handy. I hope that some other people will learn from this !!!
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Microscopes
1830 – Joseph Jackson Lister reduces spherical aberration or the "chromatic effect" by showing that several weak lenses used together at certain distances gave good magnification without blurring the image. This was the prototype for the compound microscope.
1872 – Ernst Abbe, then research director of the Zeiss Optical Works, wrote a mathematical formula called the "Abbe Sine Condition". His formula provided calculations that allowed for the maximum resolution in microscopes possible.
1903 – Richard Zsigmondy developed the ultramicroscope that could study objects below the wavelength of light. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1925.
1932 – Frits Zernike invented the phase-contrast microscope that allowed for the study of colorless and transparent biological materials for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1953.
1931 – Ernst Ruska co-invented the electron microscope for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. An electron microscope depends on electrons rather than light to view an object, electrons are speeded up in a vacuum until their wavelength is extremely short, only one hundred-thousandth that of white light. Electron microscopes make it possible to view objects as small as the diameter of an atom.
1981 – Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer invented the scanning tunneling microscope that gives three-dimensional images of objects down to the atomic level. Binnig and Rohrer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. The powerful scanning tunneling microscope is the strongest microscope to date

Tube: Connects the eyepiece to the objective lenses
Arm: Supports the tube and connects it to the base
Base: The bottom of the microscope, used for support
Illuminator: A steady light source (110 volts) used in place of a mirror. If your microscope has a mirror, it is used to reflect light from an external light source up through the bottom of the stage.
Stage: The flat platform where you place your slides. Stage clips hold the slides in place. If your microscope has a mechanical stage, you will be able to move the slide around by turning two knobs. One moves it left and right, the other moves it up and down.
Revolving Nose piece or Turret: This is the part that holds two or more objective lenses and can be rotated to easily change power.
Objective Lenses: Usually you will find 3 or 4 objective lenses on a microscope.
Condenser Lens: The purpose of the condenser lens is to focus the light onto the specimen. Most 1000X microscopes use 1.25 Abbe condenser lens systems. The Abbe condenser lens can be moved up and down. It is set very close to the slide at 1000X and moved further away at the lower powers.
Diaphragm or Iris: Many microscopes have a rotating disk under the stage. This diaphragm has different sized holes and is used to vary the intensity and size of the cone of light that is projected upward into the slide. There is no set rule regarding which setting to use for a particular power. Rather, the setting is a function of the transparency of the specimen, the degree of contrast you desire and the particular objective lens in use.

Friday, December 5, 2008
Chromatography
Chromatography is used in many different ways. Some people use chromatography to find out what is in a solid or a liquid. It is also used to determine what unknown substances are. The Police, F.B.I., and other detectives use chromatography when trying to solve a crime. It is also used to determine the presence of cocaine in urine, alcohol in blood, PCB's in fish, and lead in water. Chromatography is used by many different people in many different ways.

Types of Chromatography
There are four main types of chromatography.
Liquid Chromatography is used in the world to test water samples to look for pollution in lakes and rivers.
Gas Chromatography is used in airports to detect bombs and is used is forensics in many different ways. It is used to analyze fibers on a persons body and also analyze blood found at a crime scene. In gas chromatography helium is used to move a gaseous mixture through a column of absorbent material.
Thin-layer Chromatography uses an absorbent material on flat glass or plastic plates. This is a simple and rapid method to check the purity of an organic compound. It is used to detect pesticide or insecticide residues in food. Thin-layer chromatography is also used in forensics to analyze the dye composition of fibers.
Paper Chromatography is one of the most common types of chromatography. Chromatography is a technique for separating coloured chemicals. The colour inks in each of your felt tip pens is probably made of a mixture of different colours. Ways invesigators do this is if there was a note left behind from the crime scene crime scene investigators would put it in water till the colours rose and separated. The suspected pens would then go through the same procedure until one matched to the one used on the note.They would then know which pen was used.This can also be used for lipstick and other things like that.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Dna Fingerprinting
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Blood
Blood is a specialized bodily fluid that delivers necessary substances to the body's cells—such as nutrients and oxygen—and transports waste products away from those same cells. Causing blood to be necessary for human life.
Blood is plasma and is usually yellow but red blood cells make blood red.
Blood cells are designed for this purpose as they don't have a nucleus so can carry more blood. Blood cells are produced in the bone marrow

We all have these little markers called antigens on the surface of our red blood cells. These are so tiny they can't even be seen under a microscope.Every one's has different types - blame your parents and grandparents for all that.In fact, only identical twins will ever possess all the same antigens. There may be complications when having blood transfusions as some peoples blood is different than others.
There are 4 main blood groups A, B, AB and O, of which group O is the most common (47% of population). The blood type is determined by proteins called antigens found on the surface of red blood cells. If you have the antigen A on the red blood cells then you have got type A blood. When B antigen is present, you have type B blood, when both A and B are present, you have type AB blood. When neither are present you have type O blood.
Another blood group system involves Rhesus factors. The name Rhesus comes from the Rhesus monkeys in which the protein was first discovered. Rhesus factor D, the most important, is found in the blood of 85% of people, they are known as Rhesus positive. The remaining 15% are Rhesus negative. So people can be classified according to both systems, for example AB positive or O negative.
The Rhesus factor is important during pregnancy, a baby's life can be endangered if it inherits a Rhesus positive blood type from its father while the mother is Rhesus negative. This is because the mother can form antibodies against the baby's blood causing the mother to think the baby as a germ or infection

Blood is a very complex substance of the human body that often helps crime investigators to find the offender or any other clues connected with the crime. Let us investigate in more detail what blood consists of, how it is identified and distinguished. One of the major qualities of blood used by criminal investigators is the ability to clot.
Clotting is a helpful key to crime scene investigations as it can from an estimate guide to how much time has passed since the blood has left the body. Blood will start to clot between 3-15 minutes after it has left the body, but this can be affected by haemophilia, leukaemia and various medications. When the blood starts to clot it turns into a dark, shiny, jelly-like mass and after sometime it will start to contract and separate from the serum.
If the blood is found in liquid form then the bleeding only happened a few minutes before, if it is a shiny, gelatinous pool, then bleeding occurred less than an hour ago and if the blood is separated into a clot and serum than several hours have passed.

Blood is the most common bodily fluid at crime scenes and is the most useful due to the way it moves and clots. Blood stains left at an accident, suicide or crime scene can help determine what happened or if a crime was even committed. Other than revealing blood types, blood can also reveal the presence of diseases, drugs or alcohol and is used to determine the identification of the victim and suspect through DNA analysis. The shape and location of the blood stains also provide clues about where the victim and suspect where when the crime took place and where they went afterwards.
Blood spatter

A blood spatter is a group of blood stains resulting from one or more injury. Spatters are produced in several different ways such as stabbing, gunshots, beatings, arterial bleeding, cast-off blood, and splashing.
Bloodstains are categorised as either passive or projected patterns and a careful analysis of these patterns can provide the following information:
• The origin of the bloodstains • The type of instrument that caused the bloodstains (edged, blunt, firearm, etc.) • The direction from which an object struck the victim (by calculating angles of impact) • The relative positions of the victim and suspect • The locations and movements of the victim and suspect during the attack • The number of blows or gunshots the victim received • The truthfulness of any suspects and witnesses.
Each droplet of blood strikes a surface in a unique angle and direction. The impact angle is the slant at which the blood drops strike the surface, and the directionality is the course the blood drop followed. The impact angle is found out by using a protractor and the directionality of each stain helps determine the point of convergence and point of origin. This is normally done by strings being stretched according to and alongside the angle of impact.
Passive blood spatter
A passive stain is created by the force of gravity alone and can create three different types of patterns: • Passive Drop - Bloodstain drops created or formed by the force of gravity acting alone. • Drip Pattern - A bloodstain pattern which results from blood dripping from an injured persons wounds, a blood-covered weapon or object, the assaliants hands, or any elevated object. • Flow Pattern - A change in the shape and direction of a bloodstain due to the influence of gravity or movement of the object.
A drop of blood is formed due to a smaller amount breaking away from a larger blood source and due to surface tension it remains spherical until they strick or are struck by an object or surface. When a drops hits a surface it creates a circular pattern around the point of impact. The shape and size of the circular patter all depends of the size of the drop, the speed in which it fell, the angle it hits the surface and the type of surface it strikes.
A blood drop will pick up speed as it falls, and this, with the distance the drop falls from an inch to 7 feet, will produce the sahpe and size of the circular patterns diameter. The diameter of the spatter pattern can vary from 13mm to 22 mm.
When a drop strikes a surface from 90 degrees the spatter will form an even circle at the point if impact. If the blood falls from an angle smaller than this, it creates a longer oval pattern with a narrow end aiming in the drops direction of travel.
Blood will behave differently on certain types of surfaces. Hard smooth surfaces such as glass with produce a smaller and neater spatter than rough irregular surfaces like concrete.
Projected blood spatters
Projected blood spatters occur when a force other than gravity is applied. The size, shape, and number of resulting stains will depend on the amount of force applied to the strike.
Projected blood is classified in one of two ways, by velocity;• Low Velocity - A bloodstain pattern that is caused by a low velocity impact or force to a blood source. This impact results in a fairly large spatter. This includes arterial bleeding, which is blood loss in the form of spurts or gushes when an artery is damaged. Arterial bleeding patterns normally result in a cascading spatter. Cast-off blood is another low velocity blood source. This is blood that is ‘flung’ from an object in a centrifugal force, this usually happens when a seris of arching blows is delivered and the patterns are usually found on walls and ceilings. These spatter patterns can help with estimating the height and whether the assailant is left or right handed it can also indicate the minimum number of blows to the victim. • Medium Velocity –A bloodstain pattern caused by a medium velocity impact or force to a blood source. These type of spatters are normally smaller than those from low-velocity droplets and tend to come from impacts with blunt or sharp objects which distribuate blood in all directions from the source of impact. Again these can help determine the point of origin. Sometimes a fine mist spatter is produced and this is caused by any wounds made to the troat, face or lungs as the blood mixes with exhaled air. The fine spray may be found on or around the victim and the attacker. • High Velocity - A bloodstain pattern caused by a high velocity impact or force to a blood source. The spatter produced is a mist like stain. These are normally associtaed with gun shot wounds as bullets travel at a high velocity. These patterns tend to produce an exit or entrence wound. A blood spatter showing an entrance woud is called blowback or back spatter and this is when the blood travels in the opposite direction to the path of the object. A bloodstain found near the exit wound is called forward spatter in which the blood follows the path of the object. Projected blood spatters are also classified by type of spatter:• Impact spatter- this occurs when a foreign object has impact with the victim. These include stabbing, gunshots and beatings. • Projection spatter- these are the results from arterial bleeding, cast-off blood and exhaled blood. • Combination spatters- include a mixture of impact and projection spatters. These are the types of spatters that are frequently found at crime scenes.
Transfer patterns
Transfer patters are the results of when blood soaked objects come into contact with another object. These can include bloody shoe prints, hand prints and finger prints. A transfer patter normally happens when someone brushes against or kneels in a bloodstain, or wipes and cleans their hands or weapons resulting in the victims blood being transferred on the suspects clothing or onto floors and walls. Matching the victim’s blood to a transfer stain found on the suspects clothing may help in solving the crime!
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
FingerPrints

tented arch
Crime scene investigators(thats me) have to take picture,scan the area with a special machine(kevin probe detects the fingerprint)and use a special powder to make the ridges stand out more.Fingerprints can be left on about anything such as motor oil,blood,paint,ink ect.
There are three types of print latent-any chance or accidental impression left by raised parts of a fingerprint,this way isnt very good as the print may become distorted and or smuged making it difficult to see the fingerprint which may lead to wrongly accusing someone. anothe way is patent-these are prints which are easy to see with your eyes and are caused by another material getting onto the finger and then printing it somewhere else an example of this an inkpad,these prints are usually to take a picture.Plastic prints are a print which has been put nto somthing which has ket the shape of the ridges of the fingers,examples which are commonly saw are fingers put in window putty,melted candle wax and thick grease deposits on car parts.You then take photos of the mould then try and make non-plastic copies
Electrical detection by rolling the finger on a scanning machine which will detect the raised ridges in the finger.But when there is too much pressure on the finger it can cause distortions in the end product
Another is using powder to discover the ridges in the skin by making the ridges stand out on the surface it was put on.
The kevin probe is scanned over the ared of the fingerprint it detects voltage, or electrical potential, at pre-set intervals over the surface of an object on which a fingerprint may have been put! The results produce a map or image of the fingerprint, the probe is used mainly on fingerprints which have been put on metals as they are easier to detect.
Well I have done a lot here I hope the constable will be happy with my progress=]
Introduction To CSI
So in my job I need to learn about :
Fingerprints
Bloodtypes
DNA Fingerprinting
Chromatography
Microsopes
and then finally my case study
Hope you learn lots because I know I will!
Please leave comments on how I am doing =)









