Scientists

Since my blog is about science maybe I should explain a little bit about the people who work in the subject. All of this information will be from my perspective and portray how I see our scientists today.

                First off I would like to say there are tons of areas in science. I'm not going to be able to name all the different types of scientists because just doing that would fill half of this page. Instead I'm going to focus on the ones that stand out to me and what it seems like they do for us in our everyday lives, if they do anything at all.

            The scientist I will focus on first is the chemist. Though their name doesn't seem like that of a scientist they are definitely are. As far as I know they are the people who work with different kinds of chemicals and substances to make new ones or test old ones. They come up with the new drugs that might be used to cure a certain type of disease or illness. They can also test the old ones against the new ones to compare the effectiveness or maybe combine aspects of both to make the best possible drug for us, which will make us feel better faster.

Another Scientists that I find interesting is a herpetologist who are scientists who focus around reptiles and very often snakes. One of my old role models Jeff Corwin is a herpetologist who often  is wrangling snakes and showing off cool reptiles. Herpetologists have some of the most awesome animals to study and they are often very fascinating people themselves. Their research isn’t often very groundbreaking however it can often yield surprising and mystifying results

           Second I would like to talk about the biologist. These are the people who work with many of our life functions. They do research on our bodies and how they work. This is what fascinates me about them. They do all kinds of research about our bones and muscles and how they react to all our different kinds of activities. As an athlete this naturally interests me. They also do work with our genes and chromosomes and things of that nature. This is another thing that I find to be awesome. The way we can take a tiny part of ourselves, like our saliva, and figure out who are parents are or if we have a possibility for high blood pressure is very cool.

         Now I only mentioned three scientists here. Later I might do a couple more. The important thing to note is that there is a huge variety of things you can do in science. Even in the categories I mentioned there are several subcategories that you can be a part of. The possibilities are almost endless and if you don't know what you want to do when you get older science is a great place to look at because of the diversity it offers.

Workplace Stress

A new study suggests that most of workplace stress doesn't come from a work load that is too large or too important but it actually comes from the boss himself/herself. This is most often due to strict rules imposed in the work place that give the employees less freedom in what they want to do.

"We may have a tendency to associate depression and stress with work pressure and workload; however, our study shows that the workload actually has no effect on workplace depression,” says one of the researchers behind the new study, psychologist Matias Brødsgaard Grynderup, PhD, of the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. This suggests that the risk of workplace depression cannot be minimized by changing the workload. Other factors are involved, and it is these factors that we should focus on in the future. The researchers handed out questionnaires to 4,500 public employees at Danish schools, hospitals, nurseries, offices, etc. They also conducted personal interviews with most of the participants to determine who suffered from clinical depression. From the questionnaires, the researchers could determine the sense of justice that the employees felt in their workplaces. The feeling of justice in this context includes the feeling of being heard by one’s manager and the feeling of everyone being treated on equal terms in the workplace.

            These new findings can be used as a guide for future focus areas when stress and depression become a part of the workplace. “When the employees’ sense of justice plays such a central role in minimizing the risk of depression, this is probably the area that the preventive work should focus on,” “I recommend a management style in which there is a clearly expressed wish to treat employees properly – combined with a transparent organizational structure,” says Grynderup. The study suggests that looking at the employees’ own assessment of the work environment and possible changes to the work environment has a much better preventive effect on depression than reducing the workload. I personally believe that we can learn from this and implement these changes to truly help workplace for the better. We can improve worker efficiency and lead to a happier workplace and happier workers.

Scientists May Have Found Why We Sleep

Hello Science Sisters and Brothers! A new study has found that the cleanup system in the brain, responsible for flushing out toxic waste products that cells produce with daily use, goes into overdrive in mice that are asleep. The cells even shrink in size to make for easier cleaning of the spaces around them. Scientists say this nightly self-clean by the brain provides a compelling biological reason for the restorative power of sleep.

            “Sleep puts the brain in another state where we clean out all the byproducts of activity during the daytime,” said study author and University of Rochester neurosurgeon Maiken Nedergaard. Those byproducts include beta-amyloid protein, clumps of which form plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.Staying up all night could prevent the brain from getting rid of these toxins as efficiently, and explain why sleep deprivation has such strong and immediate consequences. Too little sleep causes mental fog, crankiness, and increased risks of migraine and seizure. Rats deprived of all sleep die within weeks.Although as essential and universal to the animal kingdom as air and water, sleep is a riddle that has baffled scientists and philosophers for centuries.

           Drifting off into a reduced consciousness seems when evolutionary focused foolish, particularly for those creatures in danger of getting eaten or attacked.One line of thinking was that sleep helps animals to conserve energy by forcing a period of rest. But this theory seems unlikely since the sleeping brain uses up almost as much energy as the awake brain, Nedergaard said.Another puzzle involves why different animals require different amounts of sleep per night. For instance, cats sleep more than 12 hours a day, while elephants need only about three hours. Based on this new-found purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel speculates in a commentary that the varying sleep needs across species might be related to brain size. Larger brains should have a relatively larger volume of space between cells, and may need less time to clean since they have more room for waste to accumulate throughout the day.

Air Pollution Is a Leading Cause of Cancer Worldwide

          The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) cited data indicating that in 2010, 223,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide resulted from air pollution, and said there was also convincing evidence it increases the risk of bladder cancer. The risk of air pollution is similar to that of smoking tobacco. The Deputy head of the IARC Dana Loomis said in a statement. "Our task was to evaluate the air everyone breathes rather than focus on specific air pollutants. The results from the reviewed studies point in the same direction: the risk of developing lung cancer is significantly increased in people exposed to air pollution.”

 

Research suggests that exposure levels have risen significantly in some parts of the world, particularly countries with large populations going through rapid industrialization, such as China. IARC reviewed thousands of studies on air pollution tracking populations over decades and other research such as those in which mice exposed to polluted air experienced increased numbers of lung tumors. The newly industrialized countries are the main problems here, while there are still some risks in developed countries like the US. Air pollution, mostly caused by transport, power generation, industrial or agricultural emissions and residential heating and cooking, is already known to raise risks for a wide range of illnesses including respiratory and heart diseases. The way air gets polluted includes diesel engine exhaust, solvents, metals, and dusts. But this is the first time that experts have classified outdoor air pollution as a cause of cancer. There were 7.6 million cancer deaths in 2008 according to the WHO, 1.37 million of which were due to lung cancer. So these 223,000 deaths workout to  3% of cancer deaths and 16% of lung cancer deaths worldwide.

 
However this has been somewhat evident over the years, I personally believe that this report should bring this to the fore mind of American’s  and other world powers to help do things about the crazy amount of air pollution throughout the world. This should help develop smog ratings in some of the larger US cities like LA and San Diego where people can be more careful of if they are inhaling in hazardous gases like CO2. There are already smog forecasts in large cities in other countries like Beijing, where it is more important to view the air forecast than the weather forecast.

Malaria vaccine sheduled for 2015

       Malaria infects over two hundred million people a year and kills around 700,000 of  those who are infected. There is a new vaccine out that was very effective in its test locations. The vaccine showed a 56% decrease in the amount of infections in the older group of children and a decrease of 31% in the younger group of children who were tested. Like any vaccine there is a period after about a year and a half where the vaccine loses its effectiveness, but the study is ongoing and the children had recently received a booster shot for the vaccine similar  to how you get a booster shot for tetanus.  The study however showed promising enough results to have the company that developed it ask for permission to distribute this vaccine throughout Africa. The company that is developing the vaccine is the UK company GlaxoSmithKline is working towards getting the vaccine out to the public by 2015. "Many millions of malaria cases fill the wards of our hospitals," said Halidou Tinto, a lead investigator on the RTS,S trial from Burkina Faso. This vaccine would help save peoples live not only in Africa but people all around the world will be benefitting from this vaccine being released from the public.

     I personally believe that this vaccine will change history forever by saving lives and setting the foreground for vaccines in the future. This will be very good for helping the livelihood of the Africa and helping it recover from being a third world country. Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in Africa so creating an effective vaccine will be very great for Africa. I personally believe this is a huge breakthrough because there are many diseases that are without vaccines like malaria and I believe that this vaccine is a steeping stone in the road to getting out multiple different types of vaccines for deadly diseases. This vaccine will only get better over time and who knows maybe later in the future Malaria may not even be a thing anyone has to worry about, that would be a good thing to have happen.   
 


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Sleeping In on the Weekends Doesn't Help Recover Lost Sleep

           Nowadays it is very common for adults and teenagers to not get much sleep during the weekdays only to sleep in on the weekends to "make up for it."  Not getting enough sleep can influence the body in several ways including: decreased alertness, productivity, failure to learn and remember things correctly. researchers led by Alexandros N. Vgontzas of the Penn State University College of Medicine, placed 30 volunteers on a sleep schedule that resembled a schedule that consisted of a work-week with little sleep then a weekend meant for sleep recovery. The volunteers measured on a performance test that tested their ability to pay attention decreased significantly after they had not received the sufficient amount of sleep, they also found that even after the weekend of sleep-loss recovery the tests scores showed no significant improvement on the test. The study however states that the only thing that didn't recover normally was attention span, determined by tests All other things measured returned to the norm by sleeping in on the weekends.
        While you don't fully recover by sleeping in on the weekends I still personally believe that the feeling of not having to set an alarm for the morning is just too good to pass up. Sleep is an interesting thing, it seems to go against all logic and reasoning. If you were to sleep for a short period of time like 2 hours you would feel worse in the morning than if you didn't sleep at all. Personally for me I enjoy sleep if I am able to get a nice full night of sleep, and it's the waking up in the morning that is the part that ruins the whole experience of sleep for me. There never seems to be enough hours in the day and the era of electronics is changing the future of sleep forever, with new high-tech alarms that make you get up and moving to turn them off and the other side with handheld phones that are often used right before bedtime causing people to stay up way later than they intended. This study shows that you can still do the classic sleep in on the weekend strategy and not suffer too much but there are still some consequences that you still have to worry about. 

Naked Mole Rats Are Genetic Masterpieces

     Naked mole rats have struck gold when it comes to their DNA, at first glimpse most people would be unable to tell how well off they have it in the DNA department. They are not very cute and they live underground, so what is so great about them? Naked mole rats have never been documented with cancer due to a protein that they have which stops cells from multiplying too much or too rapidly. They also are not very prone to ageing as their mole rat cousins,  naked mole rats are the longest living rodents with a life expectancy of about 28 years and the average mole rat has a life expectancy of approximately 5 years. The scientist found that the naked mole rat cells were much darker than those of mice. They built the engineered protein far more accurately, in other words. Naked mole rats, the scientists found, made anywhere from four to ten times fewer mistakes. Yet the naked mole rats can make their proteins as quickly as the sloppier mice. They are better at making their DNA than most other animals, they can make far superior proteins

Reading Literary Fiction improves people's ability to recognize other people's mental states

Your ability to tell how others are feeling can be influenced by how much you read and what you are reading. Reading fictional literature can help you with identifying people’s emotions, while reading non-fiction and popular fiction pieces do not help you with identifying emotions. Participants in a study were assigned to read "highbrow" books achieved better scores on a test that took black and with pictures of actors eyes and then had you assign an emotion to them. This is one of the first times that scientists have done a study on the short-term influence of different types of literature on people’s social skills.

            Why does this happen you might ask, well the researchers say that this is due to the tendency for popular fiction to focus around plot while literary fiction focuses around character development and their deep emotions. We develop the real life skills of being able to read emotions by practicing on fake minds while reading. You become more capable of being able to pick up on the small changes in someone’s feelings and emotions. Reading a book and watching characters develop throughout the book can give you the experience you need to get more experienced in social situations. Reading literature that has depth to characters and has characters that change throughout the course of the book can not only be extremely beneficial but can also be fun.
           I personally believe that this study is very interesting but makes sense in a way, you can gain experience in these make believe situations so when you are in a real situation that is similar you have an idea what is going on. This means that reading gained a new purpose, we benefit from the way that we observe and process people’s mental states.