Sleep

           This is a subject that is near and dear to me. I, like most high school students, enjoy the times when I get to sleep. I sleep in whenever I get the chance. Sometimes I wonder if to much sleep can be an issue, but I usually talk myself out of that idea. Sleep is important for our bodies, so they can rest both physically and mentally. Without sleep we wouldn't last very long but, as the saying goes, to much of anything can be bad.

                If one sleeps to much or to often, they could end up really hurting their body. Not considering the fact that you wouldn't get any physical activity if you were sleeping all the time, your body doesn't react well to excess sleep. When the body experiences to much sleep it can completely change the course of a day. Your body may be hungry more often throughout the day due to the fact that you suppressed this hunger the whole time you were asleep. It is actually very important to keep a constant sleeping schedule, it can affect things like your weight and blood pressure. It is actually more important to be consistent than it is to get the "magic" number of hours sleeping.

                  Being a high school student this can be hard sometimes. Homework that you stay up late doing, away games, matches, meets. Sometimes its just not possible to get to bed at the same time every night. I don't think it's really possible if you are a multi-sport athlete, however you can do things to help. Sleep is very important, but to go along with that its important to eat right. Putting the right things in your body helps out a lot.  If you are constantly putting bad food into your body it can make you feel tired, this can go hand in hand with sleep (I often do this too much). If you feel tired you might try sleeping to help, but really that isn't the problem.
                 Now don't get me wrong eating right and not sleeping is definitely not a good idea either. You have to find a happy medium, you can certainly have a piece of pie every once in a while, just don't over do it. Same with sleeping, you can sleep in on the weekends if you need it, but you probably don't need to take a 3 or 4 hour nap everyday after school. Just keep a good balance, when you can, and you probably wont have to worry about any negative affects of sleep. There are certainly times when you should be sleeping more than normal, like if you are sick. This is just something to think about, in the end you should trust your own judgment. I'm going to go sleep right now.

Great White Sharks Life-Expectancy is Much Higher Than Previously Thought

             Using a new technique to age the tissues of these impressive creatures, scientists have identified a male great white that lived into its 70's. This is good news (somewhat) because knowing that great white sharks live longer can allow scientists to take that into account when doing conservation efforts. Great white sharks are infamous, they are the poster-child for sharks, however we don't actually know too much about them. "Everyone thinks they know these animals so well, and the public perception is that they're either loved or hated. But in terms of the science, we're only just now beginning to understand what they eat, where they go and how long they live," said Li Ling Hamady, who is part of a joint program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US. The scientists have tried to age the sharks by using a method that is similar to the one used to age trees which is counting the annual growth rings in the shark's tissue, such as in their vertebrae. But the sharks' cartilage skeleton makes the division between these rings hard to discern even under the microscope. The scientists use a known radioactive marker in order to age the sharks, the marker is from the nuclear testing going on in the 1950's and 1960's. "Previous studies on Indian and Pacific Ocean animals - not using the A-bomb marker approach - had suggested great whites were certainly capable of living into their twenties. With the bomb markers, age estimates for the MIT-WHOI animals were up to 73 years old for the largest male in the study, and 40 years old for the largest female." All these animals came from the Atlantic, but the researchers do not think there are any significant differences between the lifespans of the sharks living in the three big ocean basins. Great white sharks need some conservation programs because they are considered "vulnerable" but, now seems likely, they are slower growing and later to mature than was previously recognised, it means also that great whites would find it harder to recover their numbers if populations are depressed because of fishing, environmental and other pressures. Ian Fergusson, a founding patron of the Shark Trust, commented: "White sharks have a fairly low fecundity in terms of litter size. Typically, females might have a handful of pups per litter, and we're not sure how often they even get pregnant in a lifetime.