Learning Biology

By: Nathan Seppa

Website: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39559/title/Disturbed_sleep_tied_to_Parkinsons_risk

Chelsea Shaffer

Article was submitted on 12-24-08

Submitted on Edublogs 12-31-08

  Before reading this article i didnt really know anything anbout Parkinson’s Disease, or much about what happens while your sleeping because your asleep of course. The question that was inferred in this article was how is Rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (REM) connected with people developing Parkinson’s Disease? A reason for why the research was conducted was to maybe find a cure for REM so people can sleep without thrashing around. Data was collected on the experiment by haveing 93 participants that were diagnosed with REM and monitered them between the years of 1989 and 2006. Out of these 93 participants, 26 have developed a neurodegenerative disease, of these 14 had developed Parkinson’s. They know there results are valid because of the 93 participants that had REM, 14 of them developed Parkinson’s over a period of years.

  What was learned from this research and experiment was that people with REM, act out there dreams and are at risk for developing Parkinson’s Disease. My opinion on the research of this article is that it seems to be quite valid. The conductors of this research are neurologist Ronald Postuma and his colleagues at Sacre Coeur Hospital in Montreal. I believe the reason for this research is to find something for the people with REM to help them sleep more soundly so they are at a lower risk of develping Parkinson’s.

  A further question that i have on this is can people develped REM or are you born with it? Yes they researched people with REM can contract Parkinson’s but can people contract REM sleep disorder? A connection i can make with this article is it remined me of an episode of House when a patient came into the hospital with REM.

For Kids: Sugar Pill Medicine
By: Susan Gaidos
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39298/title/FOR_KIDS_Sugar-pill_medicine
Erin Butler
Article Submitted: Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
Submitted on Edublogs: December , 2008

    Before reading this article, I did know about the placebo pill and how for some, it can help magically “cure” an illness. For this particular article the experimental question was why did the placebo pill somehow make the patient who recieved it better. Scientists studies this pill due to the fact that this could mean a medical breakthrough. We may not need all of the drugs the normal person due to the brains effect to the placebo. The data was collected from the testing of certain medicine to see if it would affect the patient. Doctors discovered that even patients who recieved the placebo pill were reacting as if they were treated.

Title: Hot New Memory

Author: Patrick Barry

Website:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39403/title/Hot_new_memory

By: Jake Ferko

Date: 12/22/08

Before this article I did not know very much about these new ways of storing information, which is why this article caught my eye.  Also I use up a lot of memory storage on my computer, so this would be a good thing for people like me.  My main question for this article is how is it possible to store digital information through the flow of heat.  This research was conducted because we need more ways of saving important data.   The data was collected by a series of tests.  That is also the reason this information is valid.

Through this research scientists have learned that if the heat-based memory is successful then it will be a big step for the growing field in manipulating phonons.  From all the research conducted they conclude that if this new memory works then it will revolutionize how we use heat and allow us to save a lot of more energy.  Concentrated heat will normally scatter in time, which makes this hot new memory seem impossible.  But Baowen Li, a physicist of the National University of Singapore, and Lei Wang from the Renmin University of China, think otherwise.  But they believe under certain condition information stored as protons is possible to be preserved.   Have you ever wondered why a red-hot burner will heat a pot faster than a burner on medium?  That is because heat flows faster when there is a greater difference in temperature between two materials.  But the team has proved that it is achievable to design two materials to work in the opposite way, causing heat to flow more slowly.  This will permit the phonons to stay at one of two temperatures, representing on and off of the digital memory.  If it stays at the temperature long enough, the thermal memory will be useful.  My opinion on this research is that they should make some test models of this new idea of storing memory until they come out with one that is successful.  Baowen Li and Lei Wang did this research.  The reason for studying this is because with all the fuss about how we should be greener; this could help it out by saving more energy.

After reading this news article the only further important question I have is will this new memory device be out within my life time.  I have various connections from my student life to this topic.  One is with all the technology and computer work in school and at home it would be nice to have a better way to store more data.  It also effects me because  it would help the environment because it saves energy.  Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed my scientific article.

by Alice Park
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1868406,00.html
December 23, 2008
Gabby Kaufman
December 24, 2008

This article is about the possibility of lack of sleep being linked to heart complications. Which means the essential research question is simply inquiring whether or not that is the case, and if so, why/how? This was explored because if it turns out that this is the case, more sleep can be an easy way to possibly dramatically reduce risks or even eliminate them completely. This topic was researched by testing almost 500 men and women and observing the differences in their heart health while also taking into consideration how much they slept per night.

This study was conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, who found that calcium buildup in the arteries (which can cause heart attacks and strokes) is promoted by lack of sleep, and just one hour less each night can shoot coronary calcium up by 16%. This research was simply done to increase awareness of these risks. Out of a group of 495 women and men, only 6% that slept more than 7 hours per night showed calcium buildup, while 11% was shown by those sleeping from 5-7 hours per night. Astoundingly, 27% sleeping less than 5 hours per night showed signs of this artherosclerosis. I think this is very important information for medical doctors, people who are currently at risk of heart attack and stroke, and society in general. Cutting down the risk of heart issues can sometimes include significant lifestyle changes, but who knew that it could be reduced simply by getting the recommended amount of sleep every night?

Furthermore, this research answers a lot of question but also introduces new inquiries. Can sleeping help recovery of heart attack or stroke? Are there any other medical risks that can be treated by sleeping more? Are there any special cases of heart attack and stroke that are immune to more sleep, or is this a generalized treatment? Will this be recommended by doctors in the future? I can connect to this content because I wonder if people that I’ve known like family members of family members of friends could have avoided being affected by doing something as simple as cutting down on stress and increasing hours of sleep.

Title of Article : Can Eating a Sandwish Stop Your Heart?

Author:  Coco Ballantyne

Date: December 19, 2008

Link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-eating-a-sandwich-sto

Taylor Hopkins

December 23, 2008

Can eating a sandwich really stop your heart?  Well it is rare, but the answer to that question is yes.  The things known before the research was just that this young woman was having spurts of nausea and lightheadedness and they didn’t know where it was coming from.  She went to several doctors, but no one could find the reasoning behind her symptoms. The essential research question would be what is the cause of these symptoms?   They need to research this because if they didn’t, this young woman would keep having these serious problems with no cure or no explaination.  They suspected that this may have to do with her heart, so they had her go home with a device worn on her wrist or waist to monitor her heart rhythm.  When she felt lighheaded, she was to push a button on the device, and this caused it to record her heart activity for 1-2 minutes.  She did this for a week, and they gave it back to find her results.

 They found that her lightheadedness was only after eating and drinking.  They discovered that after eating or drinking, she experienced an atrioventricular block.  They then kept her in the hospital and offered her a sandwich, and just as expected, there was an atrioventricular block lasting more than two seconds.  During this period the young woman felt very dizzy and thought she was going to pass out.  They then diagnosed swallow syncope.  I found this interesting because there was no real reason why this was happening.  Also, just eating a sandwich stopping your heart seemed impossible to me.  I think this information and research is important because they may see this again someday, and they will know what to diagnose and what to do to cure it.  It’s also important to research it to cure the young woman who is going through it right now.  It is a value to others because now that they have researched this, if it happens to another they will know what to do.  They won’t have to be the ones getting research done on them.  The person conducting this research was a pharmacologist at the University Hospital Birmingham in England.  Her name was Una Martin.  She conducted this research because she was assigned to this young lady’s case.  She started her research after the young lady’s first visit to the hospital.

Some things they could research further on would be how to cure this, and create something to prevent it.  This condition is rare, but there are still people suffering from it.  A question I have is how did they cure this?  If eating a sandwich or any food actually stopped this woman’s heart, then what did they do to prevent it from happening?  What can they do for others to prevent this from happening to them in the first place?  Does it have to do with a certain type of food or drink; or is it all food and drinks?  I know I would want to know how to prevent these things from happening.   

   Sugar Pill Medicine  By Susan Gaidos Web Edition: Tuesday, December 16th, 2008  link:http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39298/title/FOR_KIDS_Sugar-pill_medicine                Shannon Carpenter  12/23/08

   The essential research question for this article is ” Can something so good like sugar actually make you feel better?”.  Studies have went on about sugar pill medicines because scientists want to see if a placebo like sugar can produce the same healing effect as an active drug.  Before this research was done, we knew that placebos came in the form of sugar pills or fake creams.  The data from this article was collected by medical studies by doctors, scientists, a University of Michigan neuroscientist named Jon-Kar Zubieta, and a Neuroscientist Tor Wager of Columbia University.

   Some of the research that was found in these studies are that when a person is given a placebo like sugar instead of an active drug they recieve a placebo effect.  It turns out that the same brain processes that occur when you take real drugs occurs also when someone has the placebo effect.  The brain releases a chemical called a dopamine that makes you feel good.  Other studies done, have shown that placebos help patients who suffer with anxiety issues.  This research was gathered and presented by doing medical experiments on a range of people to see how sugar pill medicines affected them.  Some conclusions that we could gather from this research is that maybe in the near future placebos could help cure some medical problems without giving such a risk as regular active drugs do.  My opinion on these studies and research is that it could be a good medical decision because if your taking placebos and it is giving you the same results as dangerous and expensive drugs, everyone in their right mind would choose to take the easier and safer option.   This research was collected by medical studies by doctors, scientists, a University of Michigan neuroscientist named Jon-Kar Zubieta, and a Neuroscientist Tor Wager of Columbia University.  The reason that they all collected this research doesn’t really come out in the article.  But I believe they did research on this subject to provide information on placebo effects and to try to find an alternative to harmful painkiller drugs.

  Some possible questions that I have are: Since sugar is a leading cause in gaining weight would it eventually, after using the sugar pill medicine for an extended period, be unhealthy for you? and Do placebo effects work for every type of person such as old, young, American, Native American?  Some questions for further research:  Do you believe that in the next 10 years that more placebo effect pills such as the Sugar Pill will be used instead an active drug? and Are placebos a solution for any other medical problems?  The content in this article and research is quite hard to relate to, so I really don’t have a connection with it.

Scientists knew before hand that dinosaurs cared for their young, which meant they sat on the nests to keep them warm and they protected them from harm. This is similar to the parental behavior in some modern birds. Scientists have researched that from looking at fossilized dinosaur eggs and bones suggest that the male dinosaurs were more likely to care for their young. The results were published by paleontologist David Varricchio suggested that the primary paternal care system of some modern day birds may have evolved in the bird’s dinosaur ancestors. To get an idea about the origins of styles of parental care, the researchers turned to some of the oldest known examples. Fossils from the the adult Oviraptor and Citipati dinosaurs, all meat-eating theropods, had been found near or on the eggs. Some adults were even found when they were sitting on the eggs, raising the suspicions that the adults ided in the act of caring for their young. But still, scientists could not decide if it was the father or mother caring for the eggs. Varricchio and his team found no female-specific markings on bones from two adult dinosaurs: a Citipati, fossilized in the brooding position on many of the eggs. The absence of this female-specific bone marker in the Troodon and Citipati adults led Varricchio and his team to decide that these two adults sitting on or near the eggs were males.

The people who conducted the research we from Montana State University in Bozeman. The team was led by David Verricchio and colleagues. The only thing i would like to know is if there are any other types of research you could perform on this other than the one used. I would guess this would be very difficult to differentiate between if the male dinosaur or the female dinosaur on who cared for the eggs.

Lack of Sleep Linked to Heart Problems

By: Alice Park

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1868406,00.html

Haylee Peace

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

            Before reading this article I did not know there was any link at all between lack of sleep and heart problems. I really never thought about the subject before which is why I chose this as my article. It is important to research this topic because medical mysteries are important to know more about. After researching this and finding out what there is to know could help doctors later on with patients suffering from heart problems. The University of Chicago researched the topic by studying men and woman of certain ages as they were sleeping, while paying attention to how their blood pressure changed.  After realizing the outcomes would differ between smokers, drinkers, and people with other health problems they figured it would be easier in the comfort of the own persons home.  This led the ones who were studied to wear wrist monitors that were silent when asleep, and measured at 30 seconds intervals.

            The information did prove that there is some kind of link between getting enough sleep to lower the risk of heart problems. It is advised that doctors and patients should also pay attention to the other health risks, but also try to sleep as much longer as possible. Studies found that one additional hour of sleep was equivalent to lowering systolic blood pressure by 16.5mm Hg. The Chicago team didn’t research further on levels of cortisol which led to theory that it could just me an inflammation of the arteries or what was going on during the patients’ sleep. The results of this study show that sleeping isn’t just for dreaming, it could also save your heart.

            I think the fact that getting just one extra hour of sleep per night could lower heart problem risks is interesting. I would have never guessed sleeping to be one of the reasons leading to a heart attack or a stroke. The only question I would have is in the article it said they would have to further research the levels of cortisol to see if that is what could be causing the inflammation in the arteries, are they planning on studying this more? People I know, for instance friends and family have had heart attacks and strokes that led to their death. So knowing that lack of sleep could have been a factor for what happened is a way I can connect to the topic of the article

Title of Article:  How Carrots Help Us See The Color Orange

Author of Article:  No author given; Association for Psychological Science

Website Used:  “Science Daily”

Link:  <ref> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080722102723.htm <ref>

Name: Kendall Neal

Date Submitted: 12/22/08

            Before I read this article, I knew that carrots helped us see better, but I didn’t know how or why.  I also knew that carrots contained beta-carotene, which can make your skin turn orange if your body has too much of it.  The essential question asked by the scientists and researchers was:  Why do people automatically assume something is a certain color?  They collected the information by having human participants do simple tests in which they had to identify the color of a common object.  They know the results are valid because the human participants were not influenced in any way and did not know of any other person’s answers.  Also, there were not many variables in these experiments.

In the first part of the experiments, human participants were asked to identify an ambiguous color that was on objects that were commonly only one color.  For example, they would have a picture of a carrot that was a shade of yellow-orange or grass that was blue-green.  Half of the participants would identify that color as the color that is traditionally paired with that object, i.e. they would say the carrot was orange, not yellow-orange or light orange.  The other half would say that it was yellow-orange, light orange, etc. If that same color was paired with a sun, they would say it was yellow, even though it was the same color as the carrot.  So, the conclusion of the first experiment is that if an ambiguous shade of orange of yellow was paired with an object that is traditionally orange, participants believed that it was just “orange”.  In the second experiment, they again paired an ambiguous shade of a color with an object, but this time, they paired it with an object that could be a variety of colors.  For example, they would pair the yellow-orange color with a car or a sock.  Again, half of the participants saw one color, while half stated another color.  The conclusion of the second experiment is that it is only the knowledge of how objects are naturally colored that makes the rain determine what color a certain object is. I think this research is wonderful and the experiment had great results.  The way they conducted the experiment was very smart and clever.  I think these results will help many people understand how the brain works.  Holger Mitterer and Jan Peter de Ruiter from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics conducted these experiments. I believe that the reason for the research was conducted to help people understand how the brain works and why and how people see certain colors and conclude that an object is a certain color.

The resulting questions that I have are:  Is the way we see and determine colors psychological?  Does this have different effects on younger children?  How do color-blind people differentiate colors? This can be connected to my life because sometimes I can’t tell what a color is if it is ambiguous.  Also, it is harder to determine a color if it is in a lighter or darker environment.  Also, this shows how sometimes your mind can see things that aren’t actually there or a color that is actually a different color.

Name: Alex Magill                                                   Article Date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Title: Sewage That’s Clean Enough to Drink           Submitted: Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Article by: Bryan Walsh                                         

LInk:  http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1866469,00.html

   I chose this article because sewage is such a gross thing so someone saying it could be clean enough to drink definately caught my interest. I did not know a lot about this subject before reading this article because I had never really considered the idea.

   After reading the article the research showed that through a process it is possible to take sewage water and make it clean enough for people to drink. This resolution is called the Groundwater Replenishment System (GRS). This very expensive facility can be found in Orange County, California. It takes in a large amount of wastewater each day, puts it through a multistep cleaning process, and then is transferred into the aquifers. You might be thinking there is no way you want to drink old sewage water even though they have filtered it but, what most people don’t know is that the water we drink has most likely at some point touched sewage. So after thinking about it the idea of this recycled water is not that bad. Also even though our earth is filled with all of this water we as a whole are wasting it. Some examples are industrial accidents and poor sanitation that are polluting our water which we can’t afford. Therefore this sounds like an over all good idea.

   I do have some questions to go along with this idea though. This does sound like a good idea right now but the facility where all the wastewater gets taken in is very high priced so how long will that work before they run out of money to keep it running? Also what will happen to the waste that gets filtered? Where will it be put? These are just a few concerns I have with this idea.