Article Summary #4

Couzin-Frankel, J. Prion Diseases:No Accomplice Needed. ScienceNOW Daily News. 28 Jan 2010.

The big question is do prions- misfolded versions of healthy protein linked to mad cow and other neurological diseases- infect and cause disease all on their own? Five years ago was when the first major evidence that prions act alone. Prusiner, a biochemist, injected the brains of mice with prions, and the mice came down with neurological disease. There were limitations, though, that the mice took more than a year to become ill and had been bred to produce large amounts of the prion protein. This raised questions to whether they were prone to prion disease anyway.

A biochemist at Ohio State University in Columbus fixed the two problems by coaxing prions to misfold like he believes they do naturally. Instead of misfolding the healthy protein, they combined the healthy protein with blends of lipids. With this, 15 mice brains were injected, and within 130 day, all of the mice looked like the prion disease (their heads twitched, they lost muscle tissue, and became lazy). The mice died several months later. To prove it was prion disease, Ma conducted many tests. Will this information be enough to convince skeptics?

Article Summary #3

Amos, J. 'Farthest' Star-Mass Black Hole. BCC News. 27 Jan 2010.

Six million light years away, astronomers have spotted a star size black hole that has a mass that is 20 times that of the sun. The discovery was made using the Very Large Telescope facility on Mount Paranal in Chile. A professor from Sheffield University said that for the amount of time that it will take the light to reach us, the star will have blown up in a supernova to produce its own black hole. If one was to be at the system right now, they would find a pair of black holes spiraling around each other. Black holes are said to come in two sizes: the super massive size and the stellar sized one. The super massive one is huge and weighs a million to a billion times the mass of the sun. The stellar size one could only be ten times the mass of the sun, and made when big stars exhaust their nuclear fuel and collapse. This new discovery is found to be in the stellar size category.

The companion is something astronomers call a Wolf-Rayet star, a giant, hot, highly-evolved star that is billowing gas into space. A lot of this material is being pulled into the black hole and assuming the Wolf-Rayet arrives at the expected time, then the system will have the two black holes grow together. Merging black holes are considered one of the most promising targets for the experiments.

#7 List of Research Questions/Problems

Contrast Bath
-Does it actually work?
-Would it do more harm for the body than good?
-Does the hot and cold together really pump out the inflammation?
-What would be a “good” time to have the body part in each bath?

Electrical Stimulation
-Does it really help with pain, or is it a placebo effect?
-If it does help with pain, is it helping the injury itself?
-Does it help in re-educating the muscle when the muscle is hypotrophic?
-Is it effective?

Stretching and injury prevention
-Does stretching prevent injuries?
-Do other factors for injury include being tackled, irregular fields, weak muscles, loose tendons and ligaments?
-Would previous injuries factor into if stretching will help? Or compliance?
-How often do you stretch for it to be effective? Once? More?
-How long do you stretch for it to be effective?

#6 Refined List of Research Topics

1. Contrast Baths and healing- Contrast baths are the idea of soaking a body part, whether it’s a hand, wrist, elbow, ankle, etc. in hot water for a certain amount of time, and then switching to cold for that same amount of time, and repeating these steps. The idea of the cold and hot is to constrict and dilate the blood vessels helping with inflammation.
2. Electrical stimulation- Electrical stimulation is used in athletic training rooms along with physical therapy clinics. The idea of e-stim is to send an electrical pulse through your body blocking the pain signals from going from the site of pain to your brain. A lot of patients have it in their mind that its actually healing them, research is still unsure of it.
3. Pilates and back pain- Pilates is an exercise routine done to help the core muscles of the body. It is believed that it could help with back pain. I believe it some what because of the position they call “imprinting”. This position is used at physical therapy for patients with back pain. The position is to guard your back from being stressed by closing the arch of your back into the ground. Also, most times the reason why people have low back pain is because their abs need to be tightened. Doing pilates will help strengthen those muscles and therefore help the back pain.

#5 List of Research Topics

1. Does Contrast Baths help in the process of healing?
2. Technological advances in emergency patient care
3. Does Electrical stimulation work, or is it a placebo effect?
4. Does muscle weigh more than fat
5. Yoga and weight loss
6. Pilates and back pain
7. Does stretching prevent injuries?

#4 Current Major and Career Goals

My current career goals are undecided. There are various things that I can do. I can get my masters in special education, I can just find a job with athletic training, I could apply for a GA position and get my masters in something health related, the possibilities are endless. I really like having something to do with the health care field. I think its really interesting and medicine is expanding every day into something new. I could be an athletic trainer at a high school and teach special education during the day. I figured that would be a smart path to go, but I know I will eventually get burnt out with working over 12 hour days. So my major is athletic training. I have recently started telling people that I am majoring in sports medicine because they don’t know the difference between athletic training and personal training at a gym. Nothing against personal trainers, but you don’t have to go to school for four years to become one. Its one of athletic trainers biggest pet peeve is when people confuse the two. In five years I see myself somewhere with a nice job, trying to save up for a family and a stable life. I want to be working full time, whether its been for five years, or whether its been for 2 or 3 years because I went back to school for my masters. In ten years I see myself settled with a family, a house, a job, somewhere that is going to be a good place for a stable life. I don’t want to make tons of money, but I want to be able to give my kids everything I was given when I was growing up. Hopefully in 15 years I will be the same place as 10, if not richer (haha), and loving life.

#3 One significant Person or Significant Event freewrites and expand it

I am going to write about me being a therapist for kids with autism. This past summer was the most challenging yet, and made me realize that I could do this for a living. I was put one on one with a 5 year old whose parents only spoke Spanish. This made it difficult for me, because I could not tell if the child was not listening to me because he didn’t want to, or because he didn’t understand me. At the beginning of the summer, the child could barely sit in his seat for ten seconds. He would fight me if I told him he had to sit, and ended up in holding him in his chair to get him to count to ten as he was sitting. Everyday I would get scratched, pinched, kicked, bit, and hair pulled out of my head. But everyday, I requested to have this child. Some days happened to be more difficult than the others. One time, I had to make him throw away all the paper he ripped up and it took over an hour. I even got a playdough container thrown at my face (a couple of times). Sometimes, I thought I needed to have a break with him, because the day would be so much easier if I could just have a child who would sit in his chair. But when I saw someone else working with him, it made me more determined to get this child to listen to me. By the end of the summer, he was sitting in his chair for maybe ten minutes at a time, and he was fighting back less with demands placed on him. At the end of the year presentation and slide show for the family’s of the children, I got the child to sit for pretty much the whole thing. If he wasn’t sitting, he wasn’t making a ruckus either, so I would take that any day. When I realized that, it made me so happy to see the progress this child had. It made me feel like a job like that would be so rewarding. If I would go into special education, I would want to work with the children with behaviors, since I think it’s a challenge, and I like it.

#2B Three Significant Events

The first event is when I was a senior in high school and I was sitting at home filling out my application to GMU. I really had no idea what I wanted to do or major in. As I was looking at the application, I knew I had to pick something. So as I was sitting there thinking about what I was good at, and something I would enjoying doing, I checked the Athletic Training box. I knew I was good at math, but did not want an office job. Confine spaces distract me, and I would never get any work done. I had thought about being a physical therapist for a while, so I wanted something that would be close to getting me there. Not to mention I played 3 sports in high school, two which were year around. So, as I checked that box right then and there, it started my career path.
The second significant event happened the summer after I graduated high school. I got my first job working at a daycare for kids with autism. I was a junior therapist, which I thought was a pretty awesome job. I worked 4 hours a day, and I helped the therapists with the kids when they went on outings, or field trips. This was significant to me because I saw how rewarding it was to see a child improve over the course of three months. Every summer after that I came back and worked there as a therapist, each summer getting better and better, more rewarding. This is when I started to think that I could do this as a career: teach special education during the day, and after school do athletic training.
The third event happened not too long ago. Still stuck on what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life, I attended a summer intern program at Temple University for podiatry. It was a week long program, including lectures, shadowing podiatrist, and hands on workshops. This workshop was really fun and lead me to believe I could go to medical school and get a specialty in podiatry. After this program, I asked if I could shadow a podiatrist for the rest of the summer. I liked shadowing, but at the end of the summer I realized that its not quite what I want to do for the rest of my life. So the search continues…

#2A Three Significant People

I know this sounds cliché, but the three people who have had an important impact on my current career goals are my mom, dad and sister. I cant think of anyone else who has had an impact of what my goals in life are. I don’t have a big family, and my mom, dad and sister are all I have. They have been there for me every time I needed them. I keep changing my career goals and each time I tell them about it, they tell me I have to do something that makes me happy, so if its going to make me happy, then do it. My mom and dad always stressed me and my sister to go to college, and how important education was. This was because neither of them went to college. My mom tells me everyday that she wants me to have everything that she didn’t. This makes me want to work hard, and show to her that I can be successful. My sister has always been a role model for me. When she was in college, she worked 3 different jobs, and made straight a’s almost every semester. I cant really remember one specific environment where this has happened. It pretty much happens everyday, or very often shall I say, because I am always changing my ideas for my future career plans. Usually, its over the phone since I am up at school, and I usually call them when Im driving on my long commutes.

#1 Earliest Memory

My sister and I are 13 months apart. We have lived in the same house since I was 8 months old in Suffolk, Va. The earliest memory I can remember, and Im not even sure how old I was, was when my sister and I played in a laundry basket together. We have a tile kitchen floor so its kind of slippery. We used to take the laundry basket, one of us sitting in it while the other pushes, and pushed each other around the kitchen floor. We thought it was the most fun thing ever. But you know when you are a kid, your imagination is endless, and you can always think of fun things to do. I want to say I was two years old, because the pictures of me was still when I was bald (yes, I was bald). But you know with two girls, there is always the memories of playing barbies for infinite amounts of time: dressing them, undressing them, driving around in the Barbie car. And of course then there is dress up. It was never in my mom’s clothes, like you might see in movies. Rather, dress up clothes you would buy from the store to look like princesses. They were sparkly, and two pieces (meaning a long skirt and top).

Science Article Summary 2

Schenkman, L. How Carnations Conquered Europe. ScienceNOW Daily News. 28 January 2010.

Carnations, an exotic tropical plant, can be found in a bouquet at the grocery store, especially around Valentine’s Day (hint hint fellas). There has been recent research shown that reveals the flower’s rapidly growing 300 species, many which arose in Europe. It was a surprise to biologists because when something grows at a fast pace, they usually think of exotic places. Europe seemed out of place in this nature because it’s more of a “boring” place. That was until Europe was found to have an unusually high number of carnation species, nearly one third of the world’s varieties. Two years were spent collecting DNA from Dianthus, a carnation genus. Researchers calculated that the genus is as old as 7 million years, and Europe seems to be the hot spot. It’s not sure why the carnations were suddenly booming, but might coincide with climate shift that happened two million years ago. During this, the once humid Mediterranean Basin dried out, created winters to be mild and rainy, summers to be hot and dry, and was thought that while other plant species died out, Dianthus already had some of the traits that helped it grow in that type of climate. An expert in botany explains about the study that “this is a novel finding for European flora…the painstaking task of recreating evolutionary family trees for genera with large numbers of species is well worth the effort.”

Science Article Summary 1

Derr, M. Study Finds a Shared Gene in Dogs With Compulsive Behavior. New York Times Science. 2010 Jan18

Doberman pincshers curl up in a ball and suck their flanks for hours at a time. Researchers studied these dogs and seemed to find a gene that is shared with humans. In people, there is an estimate of 2.5 to 8 percent to have the obsessive- compulsive disorder. Characteristics show things like excessive hand washing, repetitive checking of stoves, locks and lights, and damaging actions like pulling their hair out and self confliction. Dr. Dodman and his colleagues searched for a source of this behavior in dogs, and compared the genomes of 94 Doberman pinschers that sucked their flanks or blankets. Dodman also studied pedigrees of all dogs for patterns of inheritance. A spot was found on chromosome 7 that showed variation in the genetic code when the sucking and non sucking dogs were compared. A protein called cadherins were involved in the cell alignment, adhesion and signaling which contained the instructions for sucking. Cadherins were also recently associated with autism which includes the repetitive and compulsive behaviors. Scientists are now working on finding and sequencing the gene in humans to see whether it is linked to obsessive compulsive behavior. As scientists learn more about the causes of this condition, they will increase using the term obsessive compulsive disorder to apply to not only humans, but animals too. Dr. Karen Overall, a veterinarian specializing in animal behavior, suggested that up to 8 percent of dogs in the United States show compulsive behaviors like fence running, pacing, spinning, tail chasing, licking, chewing, and barking. Males outnumber females three to one in dogs, and could be treated, if early enough. Geneticists say that because of the detailed pedigree and their similarity to those of humans, dogs make a good model for studying human behaviors and pathologies.

First Post

My favorite website is http://www.discoverireland.com/us/. I went to Ireland over the summer and it was absolutely beautiful. The people were nice, the land was beautiful and you either walked or took a bus to get around. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to travel out of the US, and its cheaper than other countries in Europe! so visit the website and start planning your trip!

Researcher's Autobiography

My experience as a researcher is very little. Last semester I took a research methods class and learned a lot of things about research, and wrote my own research paper, but that is the extent that it goes. As writing goes, I have taken the gen ed's for English classes in my college career, a long with case study papers for athletic training. that is just about it. I know I should not admit this, but I am a procrastinator. I usually wait until the last minute to get work done. But, somehow, for me it works. What makes me be successful on assignments is that I concentrate in a room with no music or distractions, and that is how I get things done. Other times is when I have a classmate and we do the work together so we can feed each other tips to help each other out.