ashorey's blog

Going off of my last draft, I am interested in the mechanisms involved in developing intense allergies to foods that peopole were previously not allergic to. I have witnessed this affect in two friends of mine. One began having allergies at the age of 20 and the allergies increased dramatically as to what activated a reaction. Eventually her food sources were limited to rice, chicken, and broccoli for most meals. Another friend of mine had been drinking beers since her late teens and suddenly developed an allergy to it that in just months became deadly and he had to cut it out of his life. 

After doing some shallow level research I found that early onset allergies are more common than you miight think. As it turns out, especially in recent years the number of people who go to doctors for allergies never experienced before or get their first allergy diagnosis in adulthood is rising. Speculated reasons could be climate change. Due to a changes in the environment, the reproduction cycles of plants are changing and not subtly. The pollen seasons are changing and elongation and pollen of trees an plants may be produced for a longer portion of the year because the cold doesn't last as long. 

Other reasons for adult onset allergies is constant exposure. A body can take years to become allergic to something it is constantly put in contact with, like a chemical to factory workers, or with the case of my friend his stomach and beer. The cause of the allergies is an intense and inappropriate immune response to an allergen in the body. Over stimulation of the immune system by the same compound for very long periods of time can increase the likelihood of becoming allergic to it.  

Colino, Stacey. “The Truth About Adult-Onset Allergies.” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report, 11 Apr. 2018, 11:35am, health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2018-04-11/the-truth-about-adult-onset-allergies.

From personal experience and random polling of people I have come in control with, I have noticed that it is more likely that someone with peanut allergies is male and not female. Off the top of my head, I can only think one a single girl I have met with a peanut allergy, and she developed that one later in life due to a hyperactive immune system disease that caused her to become allergic to almost all foods she ate. However, I know Steven, Anthony, Jack, and the list goes on of males that are all allergic to peanuts and seem to have either had the allergy since birth or developed it in a moment that compromised their immune system. For example, Anthony claims to have become allergic to nuts after a dog licked his face as child. Steven has born with a deathly allergy to peanuts. 

I began to research why this is, thinking that it may somehow be a gender-linked trait that is recessive X chromosome and therefore men, having a single X chromosome, would be more likely to inherit it and show the phenotype. Upon beginning to unveil the traits and data found in various articles, the trend seems to be more deeply connected to sociology than genetics. A study by Kotz et. al. that examined data of peanut allergy diagnoses collected in England between the years 2001 and 2005 found trends of socioeconomic and gender biases in the diagnosis processes. The rates and percentages of peanut allergies have been previously reported, but now the question is who with the allergy is getting medically identified. It turns out, males are more likely to be diagnosed than females. This is besides the numbers of people who actually have the allergy. The study also used census data correlated with the postal code of the patient to calculate the relative deprivaties in the patients life based on local unemployment, homeownership values, and others. This showed that those in a more well-to-do area were more likely to be diagnosed with a peanut allergy than those with less opportunity. This may be controlled by a hidden variable of medical access and people with higher incomes are more likely to access medical treatment for minor allergic reactions than people with lower incomes are. 

Kotz, Daniel et al. 2011. Incidence, prevalence, and trends of general practitioner–recorded diagnosis of peanut allergy in England, 2001 to 2005

When plants form leafy branches, the branch grows from the base of an axillary bud. This bud contains an axillary meristem that drives cellular division at the base of the branch and grows it outwards. This is an iterative process that repeats hundreds of times and allows plants to have multiple sets of the same organs. Because every branch happens near the axillary bud on the stem of the plant, the location of branches is very predictable. In roots, branching occurs very differently. Roots only have the apical meristem at the end of the root and do not contain axillary meristems to grow branches. Instead, in roots the branches grow out from the stem of the root from the pericycle tissue in the vasuclarture of the root. This causes branching patterns in root to be highly unpredicatable as they do not reply on a specific stem cell organ to cause the branching. Also, root hairs are created from single cells that grow out in organized directional growth to increase the surface area of the root, increasing with it the ability to uptake water and nutrients. 

Schenz D, Nishigami Y, Sato K, Nakagaki T. Uni-cellular integration of complex spatial information in slime moulds and ciliates. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development [Internet]. 2019 ;57:78 - 83. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31449977

Reid CR, Latty T, Dussutour A, Beekman M. Slime mold uses an externalized spatial "memory" to navigate in complex environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Internet]. 2012 ;109(43):17490 - 17494. Available from: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1215037109https://syndication.highwire.org/content/doi/10.1073/pnas.1215037109

A concussion is defined by Meehan et al. as a blow to the head, neck or face that causes short term neurological deficits without structural changes in the brain as seen by neuroimaging. Concussions are a very serious medical injury that can lead to long term brain damage that impacts memory, behavior, and mental ability. Why is it then that so many young athletes often go undiagnosed with serious injuries? Meehan et al. reported that less than half of high school students who sustained concussions during a football game would report it to medical staff. In college students, they were unlikely to report any injury, but when they did they often called their concussion a minor head injury, detracting from the seriousness of what they sustained. It was found that up to 30% of athletes showing symptoms from injuries known to cause concussions went undiagnosed. The percent of students in contact sports that were observed to have a head injury and resulting concussion symptoms is consistently lower than the percent of students confirmed to have concussions by medical diagnosis. This is a great pitfall in reducing the harm done to young athletes especially during adolescent years when the brain's formative functions can be greatly impacted by such a disturbance (Meehan). 

Meehan, William P 3rd et al. “The prevalence of undiagnosed concussions in athletes.” Clinical journal of sport medicine : official journal of the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine vol. 23,5 (2013): 339-42. doi:10.1097/JSM.0b013e318291d3b3

A concussion is defined by Meehan et al. as a blow to the head, neck or face that causes short term neurological deficits without structural changes in the brain as visible by neuroimaging. Concussions are a very serious medical injury that can lead to long term brain damage impacting memory, behavior, and mental ability. Many modern journals focus on brain health and injury and disease diagnosis and it is no wonder why: humans care about their brain health. Why is it then that so many young athletes often go undiagnosed with serious injuries? Meehan et al. reported that less than half of high school students who sustained concussions during a football game would report it to medical staff. In college students, they were unlikely to report any injury, but when they did they often called their concussion a minor head injury, terming it something of less danger. The percent of students in contact sports that were observed to have a head injury and resulting concussion symptoms is consistently lower than the percent of students confirmed to have concussions by medical diagnosis. This is a great pitfall in reducing the harm done to young athletes especially during developing years when the brains formative functions can be greatly impacted by such a disturbance. It was found that up to 30% of athletes showing symptoms and cause for concussions went undiagnosed (Meehan). 

While the data itself cannot conclude the factors in the lack of diagnosis, theories exist that may explain part of it. Firstly, the mean age of the athletes in the report was 15.5 years old (Meehan). Consider this age as quiet vulnerable to the critizism of parents and coaches, and highly in tune to the behavior and expectations of the social sphere. As a fifteen year old athlete, they want to be great and hold up the team, not hold them back. Often receiving injuries can make a young teammate feel guilty for taking time out of the game or attention from the medical aids, and also can lose them playing time when they want to be doing the most to help their team win. These emotions could result in the belittling of their own symptoms and potentially ignoring signs of major damage. 

Meehan, William P 3rd et al. “The prevalence of undiagnosed concussions in athletes.” Clinical journal of sport medicine : official journal of the Canadian Academy of Sport Medicine vol. 23,5 (2013): 339-42. doi:10.1097/JSM.0b013e318291d3b3

Facial recognition science is a very interesting and is a field relatively little known by the public. Firstly, research of facial recognition by humans has been performed, and the question asked was "What kind of biases are there that determine ability to recognize faces and identify their characteristics?". Susan Mason examined how age corresponded to ability to identify faces and recall names connected with the faces based on age similarity between the subject and the example. She found that people were more likely to recall the names and recognize faces as familiar of people who were similar in appearance to themselves, namely age being a factor in facial similarity between subject and example. This means that older people recognized and recalled the names of other elderly people in the experiment more often than they did younger people, and vice versa for younger people. (Mason)

Now this is all relative to the human ability, but with modern technology we no longer have to rely on the human capacity. Software has been developed to interpret faces and characteristics, identify key features, and assign a name and gender to a face. There are draw backs to this unperfected science, however. University of Colorado Boulder's Lisa Marshall published an article examining the ability and inability of this technology. Many different softwares are coming out that are able to accurately identify age and gender, amoung cisgendered people. That is, born females and males that identify with their gender are categorically matched to their genders more than 95% of the time. However, when the aoftware attempts a gender identification for trans and nonbinary gendered persons, the data does not look as good. This idea of rendering the gender identify of an individual by a photo completely falls apart when their characteristics and identity do not align for the software. (Marshall)

Mason, Susan E. (1986) Age and gender as factors in facial recognition and identification, Experimental Aging Research, 12:3, 151-154, DOI: 10.1080/03610738608259453

Marshall, Lisa. “Facial Recognition Software Has a Gender Problem.” CU Boulder Today, University of Colorado Boulder, 9 Oct. 2019, www.colorado.edu/today/2019/10/08/facial-recognition-software-has-gender....

In scientific research, the most reported upon results are the successfully produced unexpected, question begging results that blows away theories of what people thought was true. People only read the conclusive projects, the successful experiments, and the new, best research. This is what sells best, what grabs a reader's attention, what people want to read, and what makes money for the publishing databases and journals and magazines. The world where all science is performed perfectly and all projects end with sweet relief of expectations being met just does not exist. Only the top one percent of the research done in the world gets published and acknowledged. All things are glorified and hyped and the reality gets lost. Expectations get built up that success is measured and you must complete research for it to count. The reality is that failure takes up most of your time in the scientific world. Failure and trouble shooting and learning constantly are all parts of your daily life. You can't find the answer your looking for on your first try ever, and if you do that means it was done before you and thats how you were able to arrive so easily to your conclusion. People who do reserach for the results will never get anywhere because you have to be in it for the learning, the correcting, the fixing, the messing up, the issues, and the wrongs. Otherwise you will never have the patience needed to get to the bottom of anything worth publishing. 

To obtain a photo of a map, I used openstreetmap.com. Screenshot the map of campus to include Lot 45 in the upper left and the corner of Mass Ave. and N. Pleasant St. in the lower right on a square scale for width and height. Save it then drag the map picture into the inkscape window and set the width and height to 750 pixels and aligned the top left corner of the map picture to the bottom left corner of the close up phytophagy picture. Labeling this image “c” with the same method as used for the previous two photos but instead make the font black, I then made a scale bar using the width of the fingers in the first photo of close up phytophagy as a size estimate. 

To obtain a photo of a map, openstreetmap.com was used. After locating the UMass Amherst campus with north on the top of the image and south at the bottom, I screenshot the map to include Lot 45 in the upper left and the corner of Mass Ave. and N. Pleasant St. in the lower right on a square scale for width and height. Once saved, I dragged the map picture into the inkscape window and set the width and height to 750 pixels and aligned the top left corner of the map picture to the bottom left corner of the close up phytophagy picture. Labeling this image “c” with the same method as used for the previous two photos but instead make the font black, I then made a scale bar using the width of the fingers in the first photo of close up phytophagy as a size estimate.