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interesting thing about science

Submitted by ziweiwang on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 01:53

in the article and the data set that was studied in class so far, the data indicated that in patients with FH, they have a receptor lacking which allows them to take up LDL, which contains cholesterol into their bodies. This is partically because they have a mutation that prevents them from having a functional receptor. On the other hand of the spectrum are patients who do not produce LDL that can be absorbed into the body. Because these two mutations both end up having the same effects, namely neither one of them is able to get into the cell, the body reacts in similar ways, with patients that have FH and malfunctioning LDL both having a higher amount of cholesterol in the blood compared to a normal person. Because of the high cholesterol, these people are also more likely to get heart diseases and are at risk for cardiac arrest. However, the degree to which the person suffers differ depending on which mutation type that person has. If the person has a malfunctioning LDL, they are more likely to have heart disease and high cholesterol, but they are noticeably less severe compared to people who have an FH mutation. People who have this mutation, especially those that are homozygote for it is very likely to have cardiac arrests in their 40s if they are het and in their teenage years if they are mut for the gene. It is interesting to note that even though the mutation does have similar effects, the overall effect on the entire system is completely different. Trying to determine the cause of why such a thing happens is both a scientific and logical feat in which the research will need to be explained and the reason why such a result will mean that the evidence supports one side of the proposed reason over another one. Personally, I think that this is one of the most difficult things in doing research. the techniques are relatively easy once a person gets used to it, but trying to prove something to be true through logic is still difficult. For example, darwins theory of evolution is logical to the point that if all facts were removed from it it would all make sense. All it needs to be done now is to just prove the basis of the logic to be correct, and the theory has to be correct.

Draft 6

Submitted by dfmiller on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 23:23

Vaccinations have been a major advancement in public health, saving countless lives from diseases that once devastated populations. So how has this marvel of modern medicine become such a controversial topic of today's society? How have vaccines gone from life-saving preventative medicine to autism inducing, heavy metal dumping poison shots? People may claim it started with Jenny McCarthy, who cited fraudulent research compiled by ex-physician Andrew Wakefield. That may be a factor, certainly, but the issues are much deeper. The truth is that people simply do not trust conventional medicine anymore. This could be due to many facets of medicine today, such as large government oversight, consolidation of drug companies, or just hesitation to blindly trust medical professionals. It may be easy to simply brandish these vaccine deniers as uneducated, but that simply isn't the case. The fact is that there is a lot of complex chemistry and biology that one must comprehend fully to truly understand the efficacy of vaccines. I believe that every American should have a better understanding of public health, and that includes vaccines. A college or high school requirement of basic public health would, I believe, ease this distrust of conventional medicine and allow people to see the benefits of vaccines and proper preventative care.

Swamp Sparrows

Submitted by nskinner on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 19:10

The Melospiza georgiana, more commonly known as the swamp sparrow, resides in sedge swamps that include cat tails, tussocks and various shrubs. Swamp sparrows eat insects and seeds and can be found foraging on mud at the edge of the water as well as flying from shrub to shrub; often shrubs are no more than 1.5-2 meters high. They can be found in New England year-round and breeding occurs sometime between April and June.

 Male swamp sparrows sing which attract female mates. Males will attract a mate to a territory that to which he claims. The male will chase out any intruding males within his territory, often with the help of his female. During the spring months, swamp sparrows can be observed gathering materials for nest making, copulating, and foraging within their territories. Swamp sparrows tend to build their nests off the ground in a low growth shrub. They cover their nest with grasses to camouflage it. With the nest being a little higher than ground level, there’s plenty of room for the water level in the swamp to rise and fall as precipitation occurs. Swamp sparrows usually lay between 4-5 eggs in a nest. Only females incubate the eggs while the male brings food to the female.

After the eggs have hatched, usually after 12-13 days of incubating, both males and females will feed the young. The young are altricial, meaning they are extremely vulnerable, unable to walk, fly or feed themselves. The young may leave the nest after about 10-13 days after hatching. Swamp sparrows may have up to two broods during a season.

Bio Lab - D. Melanogaster

Submitted by mpetracchi on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 18:38

Bodily processes in animals are controlled hormones secreted by the endocrine system, which reach target areas and relay ‘messages’ through either the hemolymph in invertebrates or blood in vertebrates. Some of these processes include the regulation of metabolism, growth, and fertility(). Understanding these processes and how altering them changes outcomes in model organisms is useful to vicariously understand of. Testing on humans can have many ethical problems, so model organisms are therefore used in laboratories instead of humans. Drosophila Melanogaster, also commonly known as a fruit D. Melanogaster, is one such model organism. They are versatile so a variety of testing can be done on them, they are inexpensive to culture, they have short lifespans, they produce many external offspring at one time, and their life cycles have been extensively mapped. The hormone which will be tested on D. Melanogaster in this lab is a juvenile hormone. It has been found to be present in D. Melanogaster mainly during the larval and pupal stage and the effects it has are what our group aims to determine.

D. Melanogaster begins their life cycles as eggs laid by adult females on fruits and are ovoid in shape. Every stage is regulated with hormones that regulate every process that occurs. Once the egg stage is nearing completion it begins the larval stage which can further be broken down into three instars separated by molting events. At the first and second instar, the larva consumes until molting, at which point it increases in size and grows for the next stage. Once at the third instar it consumes until ready to pupate. The third instar larva leaves their area of consumption for a drier environment at which point they cease moving and harden their cuticle, a thin outer layer of the larval body. The pupa remains in this stage until larval tissues have been broken down and are ready to enter the next stage, Adulthood. At Adulthood D. Melanogaster begin the mating process in which a male inseminates a female with sperm which the female stores for egg laying at a later time.

How to make the perfect sauce

Submitted by rmmcdonald on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 17:38

The taste of an exceptional tomato sauce must contain subtle hints of flavory as to not overpower the main showrunner of a meal. To achieve the proper flavor, proper ingredients must first be obtained. Cento brand canned tomatoes and fresh basil are the most essential ingredients. The rest of the ingredients, garlic, olive oil, and italian seasoning, do not require a specific brand or level of freshness to create a decadent sauce. Start by adding 2 tablespoons of oil and 2 pieces of garlic chopped up to a medium sized saucepan. Once the garlic appears slightly caramelized, pour in the can of tomatoes and fill the empty can halfway with water then add that as well to the saucepan. After mixing, add one or two fresh basil leaves. Let the sauce simmer for a minimum of 20 minutes. The longer the sauce has to simmer the better it will turn out. Salt and season 

 

draft

Submitted by mlabib on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 13:31

Today I would like to wrtie about the fruit fly and their reproduction cycle. The Drosophilia melanogaster is an organism that is found in the Arthropoda phylum and widely known in our everyday lives. Fruit flies are very resilient organisms because they do not require much time or effort to breed, which explains as to why they are commonly used in our everyday labs. Additionally, due to their quick lifespan and speed of development, they are surprisingly useful organisms for certain types of research. These simple but complex animals have a complex life cycle, as it is comprised of four major life stages, egg, larvae, pupae and adult. This life cycle from egg to and adult can run for about a week. Twenty-four hours after a female fruit fly lays her eggs, larvae hatch. Fruit fly larvae undergo molting stages known as instars, during which the head, mouth, cuticle, spiracles and hooks are shed. During the larva’s third instar, it crawls to a drier area to pupate. The pupa case is formed from the larval skin as it darkens and develops a hard surface. Fruit fly adults develop in the pupal stage. Adults are about 1/8 inch long and usually have red eyes. The reproductive potential of Drosophiliais about is 500 eggs.

Public Sector Research

Submitted by semans on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 11:58

A recent study by The New England Journal of Medicine has shown that public research institutes have had increased contribution to drug discovery. Since the dawn of biotechnology, it has generally been the case that public research institutions perform the basic research necessary to understand disease mechanisms while corporate research has been focused on developing drugs to treat diseases. However, after two acts passed in the mid 1980s, federally funded institutions and laboratories were granted the possibility to both freely publish their inventions in the scientific literature and convert them into intellectual property for commercialization. With a decade of delay, this change was reflected in the percentage of FDA approved drugs originating in the public sector. Between 1981 and 1999, only 7.6% of the FDA approved biological molecules came from non-industry sources. Whereas, between 1998 and 2007, 24.1% of the FDA approved biological molecules came from public research institutions. Lastly, the study suggests that public sector research aims to discover drugs that are expected to have a large clinical impact.

Evidence of Phytophagy Draft (1/6)

Submitted by kheredia on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 11:48

I transferred a few of my succulents from my room onto the porch so that they could gather nutrients from the sun outside. The sky was clear with no cloud coverage but to avoid sunburn I had them partially hidden from the sun’s rays. Approximately 30 minutes later I returned outside to find a large grasshopper on top of one of the cacti, eating away at it. It had a very stable balance, because the length of this insect was nearly identical to the length of the cactus it was holding onto. 

I took a few pictures and a video to capture the event taking place so that I could store it in a visual form. The grasshopper did not feel in danger or threatened by my presence judging by how close I was in proximity to it. I left it alone and plan to return today after class to view  evidence of phytophagy from this grasshopper. 

Though this event did not occur on campus it is unlikely that an identical situation will be replicated at the university without the necessary circumstances. The fact that grasshoppers are common in my backyard is a factor that increases the likelihood of viewing more examples of phytophagy at home where I spend the majority of my time. 

 

Synaptic Plasticity Draft

Submitted by zalam on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 11:06

Synaptic plasticity is something that always seemed very interesting to me. Even after birth, your brain is capable of changing it's connections and wiring. It best described by Santiago Cajal's words on long-term potentiation: "Neurons that wire together, fire together". The concept of long-term potentiation involves three stages: input, induction and expression. During the input period, the presynaptic neuron fires a single action potential. This causes a small post-synaptic potential. During induction, multiple action potentials are fired repeatedly along the presynaptic potential, leaving very little time for the postsynaptic neuron to fire a small action potential and then die down. As a result, the postsynaptic potentials keep bulidng up and reach a threshhold where the neuron is depolarized, leading to an action potential to be fired. This event of accumulation of potentials over a brief period of time is called temporal summation. Finally in the last stage, we see that a single action potential, like the one in the first stage, is able to cause a full action potential called the excitatory postsynaptic potential. This is essentially how we learn. If we keep introducing the same stimulus over and over again, the wiring in our brain adjusts to fire a strong action potential and so we can learn events. However, our brain does have a capacity for how much we can learn. The neurons can get too saturated with new wirings if there is no way to reverse this process. Thus certain wirings start getting weaker by time and this is called long term depression. This would be another way of saying that we are slowly forgetting what we had learned. 

Draft #8

Submitted by ashorey on Sun, 09/15/2019 - 20:37

Assisted suicide. This is widely debated and I have even written a paper discussing the pros and cons and the politics and reality of assisted suicide in medicine. There are only 10 states that explicitly allow physician assisted suicide. I think that number should be 50. Picture this: you are 35 years old, have a teenage son that you raised alone and through hardship, and the bond you have with him is a life-and-purpose-defining bond. You finally just met the love of your life and got married a year ago. You've always wanted to work as a high ranking nurse in medicine, but the pay wall and lack of a degree held you back until 7 years ago when you made the move to get your PhD in nursing. This month you are going to defend your dissertation and graduate. You'll have the work and career you always wanted and the family you always wanted and life will be PERFECT. Then you have a seizure. You don't know why it happened, and it scares you. You recover. Then a month later, another one happens. You black out and wake up in an emergency room. A day in the hospital later, and you know why you have seizures: glioblastoma, or in other terms, the most deadly brain cancer. The next year of your life now looks very different from how you pictured it. Hospital visits, bills and costs, trials and placebos, etc. Eventually, you know there is just no hope, you're given a month to live and all your effort is just in elongating dying. The cancer starts to impact your speech, your motor control, your bladder control. Everything is deteriorating and you are wondering if you're even still you anymore. Why should it be in the hands of a vote in a court room hundreds of miles away to decide the you must suffer to the end as your family, your cherished son who has always loved you, watches you fade into a hospital bed unable to talk, walk, communicate, or even understand whats going on for the last week of your life? Instead, gracefully and debilberately ending the pain, suffering, and torture that bares down on you as you begin to question, am I even percieving the world as it is or is the cancer making me see that, is a more humane way to be in control of your life and experiences in living. Why should a jury decide that for you?

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