Disregard my pronunciations of amino when i talk about amino-acids, I know how it's pronounced now.

The 5 Properties of Water

1. Water is the "Universal Solvent"
• Water is able to dissolve so many things because water is a polar molecule, with the hydrogen side of the molecule slightly positively charged and the oxygen side slightly negatively charged. Thus, water can dissolve both positively and negatively charged molecules.
• Water is also able to dissolve so many substances because of the constant ionization of the H20 compounds. The ionization allows things to dissolve because if a substance is positively charged it will be attracted to the negatively charged OH molecule, and if something is negative it will be attracted to the positively charged H molecule.
2. Water is Adhesive
• Water molecules stick to other things, whether they are solids, liquids, or gasses.
• The adhesion of water allows for capillary action (when water "climbs up" on something).
3. Water is Cohesive
• Water molecules stick to themselves.
• The surface tension of water is caused by the hydrogen bonds which exist between the polar molecules of water (H20). The molecules are bonded together and therefore cause the surface tension. This is why in class we were able to have a paperclip rest on the top of the water in the beaker without breaking the surface.
4. Water has a high specific heat
• Water has a high specific heat (amount of energy necessary to raise 1 gram of a substance 1 degree in Celsius) because the water molecules are bonded together with hydrogen bonds, and it takes a lot of energy to shake the and break them up. 
5. Water has a density of 1 (gram per mL)
• Water has a density of exactly one which is important because if something has a density greater than 1, it will sink in water, and if something has a density less than 1, it will float.
• Water is also the only thing that is less dense when it is in its frozen form (ice). This is because when water is in liquid form, the molecules are packed very tightly together because of the hydrogen bonds. But, when water is frozen the molecules actually spread out a little because water molecules freeze in a geometric pattern, in turn reducing water's density. 

Prologue Reflection

            After reading the prologue in the BSCS text book i am excited to learn and explore the subject of biology this year. Many of the topics discussed in the prologue (AIDS, HGH, Cloning, etc.) are modern issues, and ones that our generation will probably have to face throughout our lifetimes. I hope that this biology course will help us understand the ins and outs of the issues, which will then help us to make more firm and educated decisions on the topics we face. I think it will be cool and interesting to learn how living organisms function and interact with each other, because those are things that we experience in our day to day lives. It seems like biology teaches and explains very modern topics (AIDS, HGH, Cloning, etc.), ones that we will be able to apply and discuss in our everyday lives, and I am looking forward to learning about and gaining a deeper understanding of those topics. 
              The new technological advancements that have been made in the past few decades allow scientists to venture even further into prior theories and to even create new ones. This provides us with new and unseen material that needs to be explored and sorted. I hope that this years biology course will be a start to understanding this new material, to a level where I can comprehend the issues and make my own educated decisions about them, and I hope that I will be able to back my decisions up with solid data and information. That's what I'm hoping to get out of biology this year and I'm looking forward to diving into the course after OAT.