ashorey's blog

Narrative Paragraph

I woke up to my alarm. I pondered that I had gotten more sleep or slept for more consecutive hours than I did the past five nights. I checked the weather: cold enough to wear pants. I responded to two snapchats. After getting dressed, I got my backpack together with all the notebooks I needed, noting that today only required my laptop. In the kitchen, I started making my breakfast. I had planned to make a nice full meal for Friday morning so I did; I got out all the ingredients and went to work. The fire alarm promptly went off and I sprinted to stop it. My roommates probably woke up. I finished making my breakfast, left my apartment, locked the door, walked through the woods to my bus stop, got on the bus, started playing music in my headphones, and ignored the eye contact of a semi-friend semi-acquaintance so we wouldn’t have to deal with the small talk that came with it. I got off the bus and called my friend back who had called me while on the bus. We talked while I walked to my lab and then as I sat down in my low seat I ended the call to remain professional.

List of categories

-Traveling

-Social

-Tasks/Getting Ready

-Thinking

Social Exposition Paragraph

The social interactions I made in a day consisted of different forms of interacting with people: in person, over the phone, avoiding interaction, and shared experiences and cause and effect without direct contact either physical or verbal. I am the first to wake up in my apartment, and today I accidentally set off the fire alarm twice while preparing my breakfast. While my roommates remained in their rooms silently, I include this as an interaction because my activities impacted their day, likely waking them up earlier than they wanted, disturbing their sleep and effecting the rest of their day. Then I consider phone calls, text, and social media messages to be interacting too. I called my friend from highschool back on the phone after I had to decline her call on the bus. We conversed as I walked to my lab in the morning from the bus stop. I also avoided saying hello to a person on the bus whom I only know in glacing passes.

My initial ideas while developing my project are that I would like my phytophaging subject to be a caterpillar web in a tree where the caterpillars eat the leaves. I have witnesses this phenomenon many times at home, while driving on the highway staring out the window, and in the apple orchards in my grandparents' yard. The tree can be bright green but the very small caterpillars devour the leaves so that they turn brown and decay. Unfortunately, I have never seen this on campus and that means my subject may have to be different matter. I suppose I will first take pictures of trees/greens on campus that have evidence of phytophagy and then decide which to use for my figure. I will also research my specimen in the photos to ensure that I did in fact take images of eaten plant matter and not just some dead leaf. The format for the figure will include the first photo of phytophagy unlabeled on the far left upper corner and next to it with little spacing the distant photo with arrows highlighting the examples. Both photos will be squares and then the map will be oriented on the right upper corner and will be rectangular as to accomadate the shape of the UMass campus. The process of obtaining a guaranteed original map may be of issue, I might consider using illustrator to create my own image with reference photos of other similar maps of the campus. That way the map can include symbols or images of places of reference on campus and the photo of the phytophagy itself. 

Professor Sarah Pallas gave a seminar lecture earlier this week I believe on Monday, and I unfortuately did not attend, but coworkers of mine did and described to me the study she presented to discuss. She works in zoology and neuroscience, and so her topic was the canibalistic behaviors of hamsters. In short, female hamsters often eat their mates, cohabitating hamsters will eat each other, and mothers often eat their young. As a biology major who has studied the evolution and psychology, this had me baffled; A mother hamster eats her offspring. Evolutionarily, typically organisms form behaviors that benefit their own survival and the survival of their progeny. In complex organisms, children will be prioritized: A mother will give her life for a baby. Paternally its a different story because its not such a guarentee that the offspring is genetically theirs. Anyway, so the offspring should be valued above self because that is the ultimate goal of life. If the progeny don't survive, then the individual's genetics will never live beyond their own live, and all lives being finite, it will not pass on its genes to the species population. This all goes completely out the window when considering the canibalism of a mother eating her kids. She has put in her physical energy into these beings for them to expand her genetic outreach in the species and live past her own generation, but she turns around and consumes her fruit to be of seemingly no evolutionary benefit. Its much more worth your time to find food than grow a child for dinner. I begin to wonder the short-term benefits of this that may drive this behavior. A food source, less competition for one offspring if the others are killed, and thats it. The take aways are significant: no futured genetic line. Without offspring it diminishes the point to continue living to simply staying alive for oneself. This would be worth it if the mother had significant fertility remaining, but the offspring that are on the cusp of pubescence are going to be more fertile and have far more chance to reproduce than an already-parent would, and considering that the offspring would pass on the genes of the parents to yet another generation seems like the children should be spared when food is scarce. This question of "Why" extends far beyond hamsters though, considering the news articles and horror stories written about human behaviors of parents killing their own kids. One specific one comes to mind: Casey Anthony. This case involved the extreme addiction of the mother to drugs, alcohol, and partying, so much that it came before her daughter's life. This psychology, unfortunately, happens a lot. Addiction can overrule many a benefitial behavior and there are endless examples party to that statement. This case with the hamster however is driven by the need to basic survival, not a rewiring of the brain to demand one thing over the hard-wired other, but an organized behavior built-in. Its very interesting, and I still don't get why it happens, so I should have gone to the seminar. 

My topic for this blog is again medically related because that is my interest. I'm thinking about the social and economic hinderences in getting into medical experiencial opportunities. Firstly, through word of mouth about how people I know have obtained shadowing positions and other low-level hospital jobs that provide them with basic knowledge and exposure to the medical field, most people get it through family connections. Examples I know include an uncle who runs an ER, a parent who knows a friend that is a cardiologist, a close family friend thats a nurse, having parents that are both doctors, giving away a dog to someone who works high up at BayState, the list goes on. Knowing somebody in the medical field extremely increases your likelihood of being considered for experiential opportunities and gives you an advantage in the field, boosting your future and youre resume. Of course, people who make careers in the medical field are often well off because it requires money to go through schooling and education to obtain those types of jobs. This alone creates an economic barrier on the ladder to the top, the metaphorical top being, say, being a doctor. If you come a lower class family, you are less likely to have connections with well-off families that could afford to send children to medical schooling. Of course, there are always acceptions, and contemporaneously there exists programs and funds to send the less fortunate to schools, and opportunities are becoming more even. This still exists however, because the system has always benefitted on the lower class and that hasn't changed. And so, if the top is hardest to reach, the entry level is more difficult than you might initially think. You might think that an easy way to be involved in medicine is EMT-ing. It is one of the classic go-to jobs for undergraduates trying to get hours and exposure and experience. This requires nearly a thousand dollars towards the class, not to mention time and effort to study, learn and pass. Then on top of that you need hundreds of dollars to take the state and national exams to become certified to work after passing the class. Everything has a pay wall.

Friends of mine are in another Writing in Biology class and were given the task of reading multiple types of articles and scientific papers, like research articles, funding proposals, manufacturer guides, etc. One very interesting article they were given that my friend shared with me was about organoid research. Organoids are created from collecting cell samples, for example epithelial human cells, treated them with just the right compounds to revert them back to stem cells, and then controlling the differentiation process to produce organs from the human genome in vitro. The scientists highlighted in the article were specifically growing stems cells into neurons that mimics the human brain. The organoids started very small and simple. Eventually the research brought the scientists to add other matter to the organoids like retna cells and a way of connecting to a insect-like robot. These branches gave the growing organoids spacial awareness and the ability to respond to light. So after, the cells were producing organized synchronized neurological signals, similar to the brain waves found in a premature baby. Although this research started with stem cells to replicate a brain to study the pathways of rare diseases, it seemed to quickly be going somewhere else. The ethics of the research is now far more questionable: if the organoid can sense light and space, what happens if it develops senses of pain, emotions, and consciousness? Researchers have claimed that might be impossible, but lets consider if it really is. The organoid can continue to grow cells, increasing size and become more and more complex. This reminds me of as late as the 1940s, scientists were convinced babies could not feel pain. This statement was based off of the observation of babies when dealt mild pain, and adults concluded they did not respond differently. To us now, this seems abserd, but it wasn't until 1987 that it was officially made unethical to operate on babies without anesthetics (https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-felt-pain/Lhk2OKonfR4m3TaNjJWV7M/story.html). If we treated fully formed children with this little care, why would we even ask the question is these organoids could feel or sense? I would answer, because we should consider what the possibilities of this science are and how our research should be adjusted accordingly. If these organoids could become self-aware, it would be entirely wrong to continue experimenting on and altering them, but do we kill them and grow younger, less complex ones? Is killing them ethical because the organoids weren't naturally created, or is it murder? All these questions should be considered and weighted in this research. 

Something Life Science related that I have my mind on to write about is the crippling reliance of capitalistic gain to drive basic medical rights in our country. An example is how the geriatric focus in medicine is diminishing. Medical schools are closing geriatric branches, geriatric teachers are few and far between, and less people want to go into the specialty. Even geriatric units in hospitals are decreasing in both size and number. This would all make sense if the need for geriatric specialists was also decreasing, but it is not. These changes all come at a time where our world population is maximizing longevity and new technology is advancing life expectancies everyday. Why then, when the need is so great for geriatric practices, is the availability disappearing? The answer is money. Because people are living longer lives, the regular age of retirement leaves people with much more time after they stop working to rely on their savings. When is comes to medical needs, they also increase as the patients age: more prescriptions, surgeries, maybe a nurse assistant or nursing home, and thats where medicare comes in. Often times, medicare patients lose money for hospitals, therefore making hopsital CEOs and the primary earners disenchanted to serving them. If a majority or medicare patients are geriatric needs, simply closing the geriatric unit helps hospitals maintain a higher ratio or earnings to expenditures. And so all these people joining the aging population are greatly in desire for something that people don't want to provide them with, all because of money. To me, that is wrong. Medical care nowadays can do so much in achieving solutions to novel problems, so why not extend that ability to all the people who need it, not just the ones who make the hospital profit the most. 

Given the leaf of an unknown plant, my observations included the color, texture, shape and smell: green and waxy on the top and fuzzy pale green on the bottom with paler green and yellow tinted veins. There were also characteristic brown marks caused by damage, most likely by an organism given the unpredictable and un-uniform shape and of the damage. I noted the smell resembling a musk and dirt or dust scent, as though it was plucked from a dry and often tread path. The general shape of the leaves was diamond and the edges of the leaves were scalloped with soft hairs on the edges. The stem was red and this red color extended into the veins of the leafs growing from the stem. All the leaves grew from the same point of the stem, with three leaves, one large center leaf and one smaller leaf on each side of the center leaf.

Green, three-leafed veiny, dark brown parts indicative of damage much like a bruise. Red stem and red primary veins. Scalloped edges with a symmetry on the central leaf ending in a point at the center. Smells remotely like dust, dirt, and musk. Evidently ripped from its mother stem judging by the rough uneven edge of its stem. Two smaller leaves on the left and right, the center one being quite larger. The top side is darker green and waxy, with rippling causing the material between the veins to curl upward at the edges. The underside is a softer, fuzzy texture and a more pastel shade of the same green. The damage has caused complete holes in the leaves allowing a window yo the other side. The stem has tiny little hairs making it fuzzy and giving it a slightly white edge. The largest leaf is symmetrical with four scallops on each half mirroring each other, but the two smaller leaves both have smaller scallops on the side closest to the largest central leaf. There is a tiny little hard red growth on the left leaf, and if the leaf were conscious I'm sure it would have had it lasered off. The underside of the hard red growth shows a slight bump also, also like the backing to an earring. The general leaf shape resembles a diamond but the center slightly moved upwards. It casts a soft shadow showing that it allows light through it. One brown spot of damage on the biggest leaf serpentines along a vein and fades at the end like a pencil being picked up after writing a "y". The veins are asymmetric and don't stem across from one another on each side of a single leaflette. The leftmost leaflette has a straight cut from the stemming point extending down to the left and ending at the second scallops from the edge. This cut goes through the leaf to the other side, it is 29 mm long. There are two less severe parallel cuts north on the leaflette of 9mm and 14mm. The little red-hard growth has a small brown squiggly mark around it that runs from the center of the leaflette vein to the edge., total displacement of 7mm. The center leaflette scallop distances are- from the outside to the center: 3mm, 9mm, 7mm, 6.7mm. The red coloration from the stem extends into the center leaflette vein by 26.5mm. The redness extends 17mm onto the right leaflette vein, but only 10mm onto the left leaflette vein. The left leaflet has discoloration of the leaf where two patches are distinctly more pale and yellowish than the rest of the leaf, reminding one of tie-dye shirts. The center leaflette on the first from the step scallop on the right has the same discoloration next to a slug-shaped brown mark of dry leaf. This mark affects the structure of the leaflette causing it to fold like a hard taco shell opening downwards. From the end of the stem to the point where the leaves grow is 22mm.