Megan Renee Essays - Guiding Light, Free Essays, Term Papers

Megan Renee Essays - Guiding Light, Free Essays, Term Papers Megan Renee Megan Renee Please, just let me hold her, she pleaded, just once? Im sorry, replied the plump nurse coldly, but I have my orders, and besides, it will only make things that much worse. To an outsider, it was a heart-wrenching scene. To the hospital, it was something that they dealt with on a daily basis. To her family, it was a mistake that never should have happened. To Sara, it was a day that changed her life forever. Katie, I cant look-tell me what it says, requested Sara Holten. Do you really want to know?asked her best friend Katie Landiman, comparing the results to the package instructions. I have to know, I dont have a choice here. Its positive Sara, youre pregnant, Katie said reaching out to comfort her friend with a hug, wishing she could help more. How could you do this to us? was the only thing Mr. and Mrs. Holten said when Sara told them. Her mother cried, and her father just turned away from her and didnt say anything. Her boyfriend Joel just reminded her that he had a football scholarship, and that he was in no position to take care of a child. He offered to pay for her to take care of it, and she left before he could say another word. Sara was only sixteen, but up until now, she was considered very mature and responsible for her age. She had a 3.7 grade point average in high school. She was going to graduate a year early, and had even begun to take classes at the local community college. She felt that she could, and wanted more than anything to take care of this baby, but They wouldnt allow it. Once her parents finally decided to talk to her, they gave her a choicewell an ultimatum really. They first tried to convince her to have an abortion, it will solve everything, they insisted. When she refused to even talk about it, they then suggested adoption. They told her that they could send her to a special place where there were other girls in trouble like her. She would have the baby and then it would be given to a nice family. Sara kept it as a suggestion, hoping that her parents would eventually come around and let her keep the baby. Then they told her that was it. If she didnt take one of those options, she would be kicked out with out a penny of support. They gave her one-month to decide. Sara knew that she could never live with herself if she had an abortion, it was not even a possibility. She wanted this baby so much and just knew that it was a baby girl. She even named her Megan Renee. She pictured what she would look like. Blond hair and soft blue eyes. The tiny little fingers that would clasp around hers, the little legs that would kick in excitement. She wanted so badly to see her baby girls little face, to hold her in her arms and rock her to sleep. She told her parents she would go to the home, but secretly she was trying to figure out a way to make it work. She knew deep down though that it never would. She had no real money of her own, and she didnt know anyone who would or could take her in. When she was six months along she finally gave up and decided that the best thing for Megan was to find a good home for her. She started to interview potential parents-to-be. She went through eleven couples, and ruled out six right away. Not that they wouldnt make good parents, she just didnt think that they would make the right parents for her baby. She finally narrowed it down to two couples. They were very nice people and had a little boy who was six. They had a little girl also, but she died when she was only four days old. After three miscarriages, they couldnt bare to try any more. They had a beautiful house, and their son Alex was so sweet. Sara knew right away that her baby would be in good hands with this family. The other couple

Biography of Robert Hooke, the Man Who Discovered Cells

Biography of Robert Hooke, the Man Who Discovered Cells Robert Hooke (July 18, 1635–March 3, 1703) was a 17th-century natural philosopher- an early scientist- noted for a variety of observations of the natural world. But perhaps his most notable discovery came in 1665 when he looked at a sliver of cork through a microscope lens and discovered cells. Fast Facts: Robert Hooke Known For: Experiments with a microscope, including the discovery of cells, and coining of the termBorn: July 18, 1635 in Freshwater, the Isle of Wight, EnglandParents: John Hooke, vicar of Freshwater and his second wife Cecily GylesDied: March 3, 1703 in LondonEducation: Westminster in London, and Christ Church at Oxford, as a laboratory assistant of Robert BoylePublished Works: Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon Early Life Robert Hooke was born July 18, 1635, in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England, the son of the vicar of Freshwater John Hooke and his second wife Cecily Gates. His health was delicate as a child, so Robert was kept at home until after his father died. In 1648, when Hooke was 13, he went to London and was first apprenticed to painter Peter Lely and proved fairly good at the art, but he left because the fumes affected him. He enrolled at Westminster School in London, where he received a solid academic education including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and also gained training as an instrument maker. He later went on to Oxford and, as a product of Westminster, entered Christ Church college, where he became the friend and laboratory assistant of Robert Boyle, best known for his natural law of gases known as Boyles Law. Hooke invented a wide range of things at Christ Church, including a balance spring for watches, but he published few of them. He did publish a tract on capillary attraction in 1661, and it was that treatise the brought him to the attention of the Royal Society for Promoting Natural History, founded just a year earlier. The Royal Society The Royal Society for Promoting Natural History (or Royal Society) was founded in November 1660 as a group of like-minded scholars. It was not associated with a particular university but rather funded under the patronage of the British king Charles II. Members during Hookes day included Boyle, the architect Christopher Wren, and the natural philosophers John Wilkins and Isaac Newton; today, it boasts 1,600 fellows from around the world. In 1662, the Royal Society offered Hooke the initially unpaid curator position, to furnish the society with three or four experiments each week- they promised to pay him as soon as the society had the money. Hooke did eventually get paid for the curatorship, and when he was named a professor of geometry, he gained housing at Gresham college. Hooke remained in those positions for the rest of his life; they offered him the opportunity to research whatever interested him. Observations and Discoveries Hooke was, like many of the members of the Royal Society, wide-reaching in his interests. Fascinated by seafaring and navigation, Hooke invented a depth sounder and water sampler. In September 1663, he began keeping daily weather records, hoping that would lead to reasonable weather predictions. He invented or improved all five basic meteorological instruments (the barometer, thermometer, hydroscope, rain gauge, and wind gauge), and developed and printed a form to record weather data. Some 40 years before Hooke joined the Royal Society, Galileo had invented the microscope (called an occhiolino  at the time, or wink in Italian); as curator, Hooke bought a commercial version and began an extremely wide and varying amount of research with it, looking at plants, molds, sand, and fleas. Among his discoveries were fossil shells in sand (now recognized as foraminifera), spores in mold, and the bloodsucking practices of mosquitoes and lice. Discovery of the Cell Hooke is best known today for his identification of the cellular structure of plants. When he looked at a sliver of cork through his microscope, he noticed some pores or cells in it. Hooke believed the cells had served as containers for the noble juices or fibrous threads of the once-living cork tree. He thought these cells existed only in plants, since he and his scientific contemporaries had observed the structures only in plant material. Nine months of experiments and observations are recorded in his 1665 book Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. It featured many drawings, some of which have been attributed to Christopher Wren, such as that of a detailed flea observed through the microscope. Hooke was the first person to use the word cell to identify microscopic structures when he was describing cork. His other observations and discoveries include: Hookes Law: A  law of elasticity for solid bodies, which described how tension increases and decreases in a spring coilVarious observations on the nature of gravity, as well as heavenly bodies such as comets and planetsThe nature of fossilization, and its implications for biological history Death and Legacy Hooke was a brilliant scientist, a pious Christian, and a difficult and impatient man. What kept him from true success was a lack of interest in mathematics. Many of his ideas inspired and were completed by others in and outside of the Royal Society, such as the Dutch pioneer microbiologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), navigator and geographer William Dampier (1652–1715), geologist Niels Stenson (better known as Steno, 1638–1686), and Hookes personal nemesis, Isaac Newton (1642–1727). When the Royal Society published Newtons Principia in 1686, Hooke accused him of plagiarism, a situation so profoundly affecting Newton that he put off publishing Optics until after Hooke was dead. Hooke kept a diary in which he discussed his infirmities, which were many, but although it doesnt have literary merit like Samuel Pepys, it also describes many details of daily life in London after the Great Fire. He died, suffering from scurvy and other unnamed and unknown illnesses, on March 3, 1703. He neither married nor had children. Sources Egerton, Frank N. A History of the Ecological Sciences, Part 16: Robert Hooke and the Royal Society of London. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 86.2 (2005): 93–101. Print.Jardine, Lisa. Monuments and Microscopes: Scientific Thinking on a Grand Scale in the Early Royal Society. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 55.2 (2001): 289–308. Print.Nakajima, Hideto. Robert Hookes Family and His Youth: Some New Evidence from the Will of the Rev. John Hooke. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 48.1 (1994): 11–16. Print.Whitrow, G. J. Robert Hooke. Philosophy of Science 5.4 (1938): 493–502. Print.