Writing in Biology - Section 1

My natural hair is thick, curly, and brown and has many notable characteristics that make it equally intolerable but has a few benefits. It does not hold on to moisture well and dries up very fast, especially the back parts of my hair. When brushing it, the strands get tangled almost instantly and even when it is detangled it quickly goes back to being difficult to brush again. Also, when brushing dry curly hair, it becomes poofy and expands. This is different from when I brush my wet hair, which is easier to detangle and does not ruin it. Even with having so much hair, it is light and airy and makes for a good pillow. Curly hair also frizzes easily any time there is hot or humid weather. But most of the time I wear my hair straight to avoid the complications of curls. 

In the 1960s, there was a request for understanding the reach of right material to the right audience. During the segmentation phase of the U.S. market, businesses took advantage of radio and especially t.v. to sell their messages to the consumer. Advertising not only opened the consumer to a variety of information, but also enabled them to a greater variety of goods and services. The article points out that t.v. was the main method of choice for advertisement because it gave individual brands their very own identity. In the end, the introduction of the television to American families revolutionized the strategies of marketing. Television allowed marketers to apply their advertisements to a broad range of audience. This phase of U.S. marketing allowed for the one on one relationship of the seller and the customer. This close relationship strategy of the producer and consumer of the 1960s can be witnessed in the modern world. Today, the key function of social media is allowing more producers to interact with their customers. Social media is serving as a structure that not only producers, but also consumers to critique and rate back their service. This in sense is pushing companies and brands to question where they can improve their products and how they can go about it. 

In marketing exchange, the producer and and the consumer are so important, that a market cannot function without the other. According to Richard Tedlow, the market prior to 1800s was divided through geographic fragments. This way of market called fragmentation, employed “brute facts of logistics” (Tedlow 10). In other words, the markets of the U.S. at that time were dependent on the specific region with no consideration for marketing strategies.  After World War II, the United States’ production and transportation of goods had increased with the increase in American infrastructure. The most important innovation that led to such increase was the railroad and the telegraph. The telegraph was an older version of present day social media. With the telegraph, commercial information grew, enabling industries “to direct a sales force whose members worked thousands of miles from the home office”(Tedlow 12). Furthermore, the railroad transported people and goods across the U.S. in a much faster rate. This efficiency in transportation led to industrial growth.

Since the landing in November 2018, InSight lander has been collecting information to help scientists better understand the internal structure and evolution of our neighboring planet. The device measures the temperature of the upper crust of Mars, records the sounds of alien earthquakes and measures the strength and direction of the planet’s magnetic field. InSight discovered a very peculiar electrically conductive layer, about 6.4 kilometers thick, deep below the surface of Mars. It is too early to speak with any certainty, but there is a chance that this layer can be a global reservoir of liquid water. 

According to the review article,fish that have had the DIO3 gene knocked out (a gene that binds to T4 and prevents it from affecting certain cells) have a higher neural crest cell proliferation migration and activation as well as apoptosis. In adult mice, hypothyroidism decreases mitotic neuroblast but not proliferation progenitosin SGZ, decreased number of committed neural progenitors and mature neuroblast and have reduced level of immature hippocampus neurons. Other studies have shown that OPC derived from SVZ-NCS requires a TH free environment, and a decrease in TH leads to a decrease in neurogenesis but not in oligodendrogenesis. The figure in the review article indicates that an increase in TH would cause the NSC commitment, and the lack of TH would cause determination in glial cells.  In studies that were conducted with TTR null mice, which have a lower thyroid hormone level, had reduced the apoptosis of progenitors in SGZ in adults. Other studies using TRa1 and DIO3 also confirm that in general, an increase in thyroid hormone leads to an increase in neurogenesis and neuron cell differentiation. A decrease in thyroid hormone generally indicates that there is a higher amount of oligodendrogenesis, as well as better remyelination of neurons. However, all of these studies are done in adult rodent brains and not developing zebrafish brains. 

A topic of life science I would like to explore is homeopathy, an alternative take to medicine. Homeopathy is defined as a system of alternative medicine based on the doctrine "like cures like," claiming that a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people would cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopathy is interesting because as a student who wants to practice medicine in the future, the idea of injecting a virus into a sick patient to make them feel better contradicts what's taught in class. It is common knowledge that medication is used to cure a disease, which opposes homeopathy. Another doctrine that homeopathy follows is "potentization." The claim states that disease-causing ingredients in a substance would be more potent in a diluted setting, enhancing the effects. This doctrine does not make sense either because the more diluted a solution, the less concentrated/powerful it is. An external resource goes so far to say that if scientists want a single atom of the disease-causing substance (the most powerful way to enhance the effects), you must dissolve the single atom into 1*10^20 parts of water, making a pill that would be as long as the distance from the Earth to the Sun (150,000,000 km), "a pill so massive it would collapse into a black hole under its own mass." The third doctrine that backs the second one up is that "miasms" exist in solution. Essentially, a "bad air" or "spirit-like essence" is left inside the solution after extreme dilution, making the solution useable. We now know today that these doctrines are not true, and we do scientific research and experiments to understand what works and what does not work. 

Negative feedback loops are a vital part of human anatomy and physiology. Negative feedback loops are involved in a wide variety of functions such as body temperature or insulin regulation. When these feedback loops go awry, all sorts of problems can take place. One example of a malfunctioning negative feedback loop is seen in type 1 diabetes. Insulin regulation is controlled through a negative feedback loop where pancreatic beta cells are the receptor cells. In type 1 diabetes, there are no pancreatic beta cells, they are destroyed by the immune system. Because of this the regular negative feedback loop, which supplies insulin to the blood when blood glucose levels are elevated, cannot function properly. This lapse in negative feedback loop function results in no insulin delivery to cells based on glucose levels in the blood. This is why individuals with type 1 diabetes need to inject themselves with insulin, their cells cannot deliver it on its own. 

In order to understand the human body, model organisms are used as replacements for humans in experiments.  These organisms are chosen for a variety of factors.  First, they must be genetically similar to humans or have enough similarities in the area of study.  Next, they need to have a short generation span so the effects of the study can be observed through the entire lifespan and into furture generations.  During their lifespan, model organisms need to produce a large number of progenies to increase the sample size of the population.  The gene crosses must be controlled as well and they must be suited to live in lab settings.  Finally, the organisms need to have an accumulated body of knowledge.  One example of a model organism if E. coli which are useful for the study of cell respiration. 

Knowledge has been gathered and passed on through many generations throughout human history, and humans have amassed a lot of information through history. Being a biology student, I can’t help but to be curious to everything that we know. How did we come to find this out? How did people even think to go about doing certain things that led to massive discoveries? I guess some of that can be answered by pure chance, as they say sometimes the best discoveries are the ones you make by accident. One such example is the discovery of penicillin, but circumstances such as this often make me wonder, if that hadn’t happened, would penicillin not have been discovered until much later? How many things have been right under our nose by chance, but we just haven’t noticed them? How long until something like that will come along again? Maybe I ask too many questions, but in biology I think that’s acceptable.

In-situ hybridization is a method used in many different areas of science. This is a lab technique where anti-sense mRNA probes are used to target spacific mRNA sequences in an organism. This method allows scientists to locate cells where specific genes are expressed. The mRNA sequence is targeted for a reason. Every cell in the body has the same DNA sequence, so targeting a section of DNA would label every cell. Proteins are made as a result of the central dogma; proteins are exported from the cell to other cells, so it is not possible to determine the specific cells that encode for that gene. This method allows you to pinpoint the exact cells that encode a specific gene, and count those cells. This process is very useful in genetics and neuroscience in particular. This method can be used in any area of the body and with any organism, so you can compare where one gene is expressed in different organisms.