Thursday, April 24, 2014

Traffic Patterns Lab

Location: Mercer Village-Barnes & Noble Bookstore

Elapsed Time: 10 minutes

Almost 75% of the vehicles that drove by consisted of one driver and no passengers. Over 50% of the vehicles were classified as "small" vehicles, and 75% of drivers were not multitasking.

If a rate of 76 vehicles every 10 minutes continued for an entire hour, 456 vehicles would pass by Mercer Village in an hour. Tables 1-3 below display the values recorded during lab.


Table 1.
# of People in Vehicle
# of Vehicles
1
56
2
15
3
3
4
1
5
0
6
0
7
0
8
1
TOTAL:
76


Table 2.
Vehicle Type
# of    Vehicles
Small
41
Large
15
Truck
10
Van
2
Semi
3
Motorcycle
0
Trailers
0


Table 3.
Multitasking
# of Drivers
None
57
Eating
0
Texting
5
Drinking Beverage
1
Smoking
2
Talking on Phone
6

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Mitochondrial Eve and the Diversity of Mankind

Science suggests that there is a maternal ancestor of all human beings. She is referred to as mitochondrial Eve (mtEve). All humans get their mitochondrial DNA from their mother. Genetics suggests that 99.9% of each humans mitochondrial DNA is the same. Knowing this allows for scientists to trace back to where they think mtEve originated. The picture below is a geographic depiction of this idea. According to this image she was most likely from Northeastern Africa.




This idea is amazing considering the diversity of the human population. 5 different peoples are identified below from across the world as an example of this diversity.

        Tujia of China                              Arab of Egypt                    
     
                 


      Wolof of Senegal                    Peruvian of Peru                 Danish of Denmark



Photos are courtesy of Joshua Project