Second Semester Begins with CELLS!

What are cells? Who discovered them? Why do they matter? What are they made of? How do they work? What happens when they don't work right?

These are all questions we will be investigating during our Cells unit.

We're starting out with the film "The Cell - The Hidden Kingdom" which shows how cells were first discovered in the 1600s.  The website for the film is http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00m425d  and you can watch it in 10 minute chunks on YouTube here or you can search for "The Cell The Hidden Kingdom." (the YouTube link will not work in school because CPS blocks YouTube, but you can watch it outside of school.)

The Cell - The Hidden Kingdom - photo from BBC website. 

It traces the work of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, Robert Brown, Joseph Lister, Theodore Schwann, Matthias Schleiden, Rudolph Virchow, Luis Pasteur, Robert Remak and others as they discovered that all living things are made of cells and that all cells come from other cells.

Van Leeuwenhoek's single lens microscopes were the most powerful for over a century after his death.
image from  bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2008/08/early-microscopes.html

Here is a link to Robert Hooke's book, Micrographia you can click on the links to the right of the test in the e-book to see the amazing drawings that Hooke created.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491/15491-h/15491-h.htm

Hooke's drawing of the face of a housefly from Micrographia. Image from www.Gutenberg.org