Whenever you go hiking on a trail or visit a park, the locals always insist that you leave no footprint.  They insist that you keep the environment the way you found it so it stays in good condition.  We feel the same way about the whole planet but we don’t treat Earth that great and its starting to show us that.  I followed an MIT study following 18 random households and the University calculated their carbon footprints.

“Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you’re a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the global average” (MIT.edu)  Every person in the US contributes to the high amount of greenhouse gasses there is no avoiding it.  It is crazy to think that Donald Trump, President Obama, me Ethan Asam and those unfortunate enough that are living in the streets all produce more greenhouse gasses than the global average.

The MIT class studied in an observational study the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles.  The class studied every lifestyle ranging from the homeless to multimillionaires and from “monks to soccer moms”.  What they discovered was no matter the lifestyle you had, Americans won’t drop below a certain emission floor. “Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop,” (Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering).

When thinking about carbon footprints you would think the homeless, monks and children would have a rather low one but when you think hard about the subject you realize that the Government provides us with many public goods that go into each persons carbon footprint.  The Government provides police, roads, libraries, the court system and the military and all of these leave a rather big carbon footprint on the Earth and they certainly leave a bigger footprint than other countries in the world.

The MIT students conducted detailed interviews and made detailed estimates of the energy usage of 18 lifestyles and they concluded that the American average carbon footprint was 20 metric tons compared to a world average of only 4 tons.  The floor that no American falls beneath is 8.5 metric tons and that is still twice the global average.  Whether bias or high estimating made its way into the observational study, we as a country still omit by a large amount more carbon dioxide than any other country.  And for the record the 8.5 metric tons was from a “homeless person who ate in soup kitchens and slept in homeless shelters.”

I believe these measurements are spot on though because the emissions were looked at with great detail.  The students considered everything a person did like a “rebound effect”, for example if someone purchases a hybrid rather than a gas guzzler or long airplane rides.  The numbers are spot on and this is an indicator for us as a country to change.  One thing the class reported also is that when you save energy you save money so a rational person would want to lower their carbon footprint.

I wanted to end with a positive though because the U.S. is heading in the right direction with their recent commitment with China to reduce their greenhouse emissions.  Barack Obama and Xi Jinping announced last month that both countries plan to cut emissions between 26 and 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.  This is more than double what each country had planned before.  I think we are headed in the right direction to lower our carbon footprint from the staggering 20 metric tons it is now.

Sources Cited:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120242/us-and-china-reach-agreement-climate-change

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2008/footprint-tt0416

It’s flu season and the need to wash your hands is at an all time high to ensure safety from the flu and the norovirus.  I personally tend to wash my hands more than the average guy because I believe that washing your hands often is key in preventing sickness.  I looked into whether washing your hands often helps you or actually hurts you and what soaps are best to clean your hands.

During the winter months my hands get extremely dry and it causes a great deal of pain and washing my hands often just makes the effects worse.  I researched the effects of washing your hands too frequently and the results were a bit frightening.  “Repeated washings, especially with soaps containing sodium lauryl sulfate or other compounds, can trigger hand dermatitis–particularly in dry climates like our own.” (Yeates)  Dermatitis is marked by scaling, redness, itching and burning and can take months to heal.  I wonder if my repeated hand washing causes Dermatitis in my hands or if it is just really dry skin.

60 healthcare workers at a University Hospital’s Case Medical Center in Cleveland were monitored in an observational study where they washed their hands 10 times daily and 63 percent of those 60 contracted Dermatitis.  So clearly there are some downsides when trying to stay clean during flu season.  Kristen Dascomb recommends “alcohol-based products not only [to] kill the germs but also [to] have emollients in them that help enhance the moisture in the skin,”.

This brings up the issue of what kind of soaps to use because some are actually making people more sick.  Soaps such as antibiotic soaps work less effectively than regular soaps and actually increase frequencies of fevers, runny noses and coughs.  Soaps like these have Triclosan which kills weak bacteria but favors the tolerant bacteria.

Along with worrying about the flu this year we also have to worry about the harmful effects of trying to prevent the flu and how we do it.  The soaps we use can be extremely unsafe and washing our hands can cause Dermatitis which is painful and doesn’t heal for months.  Be careful this winter and get the flu shot!

Works Cited:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/07/27/how-washing-your-hands-and-germophobia-can-damage-your-brain.aspx

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=2588911

Earlier today I commented on a blog about suicides and I spoke about how concussions have recently been contributing to many of the suicides for example the death of Kosta Karageorge.  This topic has always interested me so I decided to look into the details of Concussions and CTE in regards to the NFL and other athletes.

CTE stands for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in athletes (and others) with a history of repetitive brain trauma, including symptomatic concussions as well as asymptomatic subconcussive hits to the head.  Throughout the last 50, rule changes and equipment changes have occurred frequently due to research and suicides of many of our loved athletes.  You can see the whole timeline of the concussion epidemic in the NFL here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/league-of-denial/timeline-the-nfls-concussion-crisis/.

“Dr. Ann McKee, director of neuropathology at Boston College, also serves as a member of the Mackey White Traumatic Brain Injury Committee for the National Football League.”  She has examined many brains of deceased NFL players one including Junior Seau who committed a sudden suicide at the age of 43.  Dr. Ann McKee determined that Junior Seau had CTE and that was a big contributor to his suicide of a gunshot to the chest.  Since then 5,000 NFL players have sued the league over the dangers of concussions and brain damage.

“We have known about CTE since the 1920s, when it was first associated with boxing,” (McKee).  That is where the File Drawer Problem came into play because the NFL ignored and disregarded many signs of injuries in players and developing research.  In 2003 a New York Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet, was knocked out cold and was examined by Dr. Elliot Pellman, the Jets’ team doctor, who is also head of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee and was sent back into play.  The File Drawer Problem occurs again in January 2004 when “the MTBI committee publishes a paper in Neurosurgery emphasizing that the NFL’s concussion problem is relatively small” saying that athletes recover quickly from concussions.

“CTE results in memory loss, mood swings, change of behavior, and sometimes suicide,” (McKee)  In a study of 80 former football players 77 of them showed definitive signs of CTE.  CTE has even shown up in the brains of healthy 18 year old high school football players.  CTE progresses even after a player has retired and there is no treatment or way of knowing you have it until after death.  Countless athletes including: Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, 36-year-old Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Justin Strzelczyk, Philadelphia Eagle Andre Waters and many more have passed away due to CTE and an alarming rate of Athletes are dealing with issues from countless hits to the head during their career in the NFL.

CTE and concussions are a huge deal and are contributing to many deaths and problems for athletes during and after their career.  The NFL has covered the severity of the issue but recently has promoted research and funded research to help learn about CTE.  Hopefully one day we can protect our athletes from head trauma possibly better designed helmets or different rules but for now head trauma remains a serious issue in the NFL and for its athletes.

Sources Cited:

http://www.kbtx.com/home/headlines/Brain-Injury-Expert-Says-Concussions-Having-Devastating-Impact-On-Football-283528921.html

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/30/us/nfl-concussions-fast-facts/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sports/league-of-denial/timeline-the-nfls-concussion-crisis/

I wrote about soft drinks and the affects it has on our bodies in an earlier post so I decided to investigate the artificial sweeteners and sugars used in drinks further and what really is the better option.  The only way to stay completely stay away from the dangers of sugar and artificial sweeteners is repaving them with other options.  Instead of soda maybe water ad instead of dessert maybe fresh fruit with natural sugars.

There are only 5 FDA approved artificial sweeteners: sucralose (Splenda), acesulfame potassium (Sunett, Sweet One), aspartame (Equal, NutraSweet), neotame, and saccharin (SugarTwin, Sweet’N Low).  It is hard decision when debating which sweetener to use.  “It’s a taste issue,” says Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Public Health. “They each have separate taste effects and different people react differently to each of them.”  Although this is true I think this is a possible bias because I think nowadays people are more health concious about what drinks they consume.  People choose diet sodas because they feel that they are a healthier alternative to regular soda.  Artificial sweeteners may not be a better option, just a different taste.

My mother uses Stevia with her tea every day and it has 150 times the sweetness of sugar but there are health concerns and it has been prohibited in the US until 2008.   Stevia is a natural sweetener but companies refine it a great deal before it is released to the public making it a somewhat artificial sweetener.  Artificial sweeteners trick your body by using less quantity to trigger your bodies receptors and this is why you will taste a stronger taste if you eat one sweet n low packet rather than a sugar packet.

One of my main concerns with artificial sweeteners is the unpredictability.  There are many people who believe artificial sweeteners cause cancer in people and there isn’t conclusive evidence supporting this yet but its certainly a possibility.  There has been an association with cancer and artificial sweeteners in rats which have some people questioning sweeteners safety.  Sweeteners like Aspartame and Saccharin have gone through studies and have been taken off the market due to risk to humans and this is what makes me question other artificial sweeteners.

In regards to the choice between sugar and artificial sweeteners,  http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/health/artificial-sweeteners-soda/ has a great explanation on the benefits of both.  Sugar is suggested more for the taste and artificial sweeteners for people trying to lose weight because they don’t have calories.  The one problem is they trick your body  by making it believe its going to get sugar and it doesn’t always know how to respond.

Like in class when we learned about how cigarettes were once thought of as healthy I think the same aspect can be connected with things like phones, high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners.  I believe that since there is so much unknown about how the body deals with artificial sweeteners the best thing to do is stay away from it.  Look for substitutes and limit all the sweets you eat.

Sources Cited:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/health/artificial-sweeteners-soda/

The age old question, should I sleep or study tonight? It happens almost every day for college students.  Many of my friends pull all nighters studying the day before an exam and swear that it truly works but findings by Brown University say otherwise.

College students tend to be some of the most sleep deprived people in the country and it is because of the “irregularity of their sleeping habits”.  According to a 2001 Brown study, only 11% of college students have a healthy sleeping schedule.  So 89% of college students are having an unhealthy nights rest.  According to a Brown University study college students should really be getting 8 hours of sleep a day and that is a pretty well known fact but since that rarely happens with college students I looked into the effects of getting less sleep.

College students need a full 8 hours in order to learn effectively because your brain needs “deep sleep” and “dream sleep”.  The main idea in this blog is the effectiveness of “All Nighters” because many college students recommend them for their efficiency but Brown studies disagree with the effectiveness.  “You can memorize facts during an all-night study session and recall the information through short-term memory for a test the next day, but you will most likely have to re-learn the material for a later cumulative exam.”  All nighters may help you in the short term for one test but they certainly hurt you in the long run.  This makes me think by pulling all nighters am I as a student wasting money by not actually learning the material because I am only going to forget it in a week.

The side effects are endless when not getting enough sleep.  They include physically weakening your immune system and everyone seems to have a weaker immune system in college.  Lack of sleep affects your mental health by resulting in tension, irritability, depression, confusion, and generally lower life satisfaction.  And even if you sleep later on the weekends this adds to an irregular sleep pattern.

The final question is not the effects of all nighters but if they are worth it.  That is where I think this article lacks information.  You can check it out here: http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Health_Services/Health_Education/common_college_health_issues/sleep.php.  The findings of these Brown experiments could very easily be a false positive because some people naturally need less sleep and can function well with very little sleep.  I am questioning with their experiments whether they randomized correctly not only with different heights, sex and ethnicity but with different majors, different ages, and different colleges.  Especially in regards to some harder majors, kids are forced to pull all nighters due to the difficulty of their classes and tests.  I know personally kids who major in architectural engineering and mechanical engineering and they pull all nighters frequently and strive because of it.

Sleep is very important for college students and believe me I love a good nights sleep but sometimes I do see that it is worth it to lose sleep to study even though you may experience some of the side effects of a lack of sleep.

Sources Cited:

http://www.brown.edu/Student_Services/Health_Services/Health_Education/common_college_health_issues/sleep.php

http://campusmindworks.org/students/self_care/sleep.asp

As I write this very blog my two dogs are leaning right up against me clueing me into the answer to this question.  It is a very obvious answer that dogs are truly mans best friend but what do dogs think about people?  Are people dogs best friend?  People have always wondered what animals thought and now its becoming a possibility with Brain Scans.  Dogs live in about 50% of American homes so a study like this could affect half of the country and peak the interest of the whole world.  Dogs were gathered in an MR Research Center in Budapest and scientists studied the brain activity and chemical reactions in the brain to better understand how dogs feel towards their human companions.

“Because dogs can’t speak, scientists have relied on behavioral observations to infer what dogs are thinking.” (Berns 2013)  Scientists can’t ask a dog why it did something or how it feels so there has been a roadblock in animal studies for years which is a huge business.  Now according to Gregory Berns by training dogs to willingly go through MRI machines we can “bypass the constraints of behaviorism” and learn about the internal state of dogs.

Gregory Berns trained volunteer dogs to work MRI machines because if dogs were sedated you couldn’t research their emotions and perceptions.  He started with his dog Callie, a skinny black terror mix, to go into the MRI machine and sit completely still for 30 seconds.  Gregory Berns and his team have already made many connections and realizations about the canine brain and have gathered 12 more MRI certified dogs.

Gregory Berns looked into mainly how dogs process scents because that is how dogs understand everything around them; through their nose.  Scientists found that “dog owners’ aroma actually sparked activation in the “reward center” of their brains, called the caudate nucleus.”  The caudate nucleus is where most of the action occurs inside dogs brains and Berns actually found out that dogs prioritize human scents of the smell of anything else and actually think of people as family and value them more than their own family of dogs.

This study has found that the human caudate is actually very similar to the canine caudate.  Dogs react to smells and familiar faces much like people do so its only safe to assume that canines love their loyal companions.  Berns has found that “many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate.”  We aren’t positive that dogs love us but its a pretty safe bet.

MRI studies on animals brains haven’t fully convinced me on the reliability of the findings because a great deal of the study is relating dogs brains to peoples but it makes a great deal of sense and seems like it can help better understand the world around us.  Maybe it can one day help understand why some animals are aggressive or why some animals do what they do.  For right now much of that is a mystery but soon enough I’m sure we will figure it out.  And the whole time I wrote this, my puppy Wembly never left my side.

For more about Berns’s study you can check out this NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Sources Cited:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://mic.com/articles/104474/brain-scans-reveal-what-dogs-really-think-of-us

Many people seem to be against vaccines for reasons that I don’t understand.  My father is an anestesiologist and he has a fellow co-worker who is extremely against all vaccinations and takes to social media like Facebook to voice his concerns.  There are studies  that link vaccinations to disorders like down syndrome and many studies say that vaccinations do nothing but I believe that there are no downsides to vaccinations; besides the little pinch.

Before vaccines, the only way to stay safe from various diseases was to contract the disease and beat it so your body would have antibodies from a disease and be able to kill it next time it traveled into your body.  This is called “naturally acquired immunity” and from natural immunity you have the symptoms of the disease and have to deal with any complications which in some cases can be deadly.  Vaccinations work the same way but are a shortcut because they take the antibodies of the weakened disease and insert a serum into your body.  This creates immunity without the full strain of a disease and without the risk of passing on a disease to friends or family.

One benefit of vaccinations is it is much cheaper to prevent disease than treat them like seen in the image above.  You can visit the blog of the photo to see a pro vaccination writers view on vaccination vs. not vaccinating at: https://vaxplanations.wordpress.com/tag/vaccine/.  In dollars vaccines have saved millions of dollars, “in the United States, researchers estimated that for every dollar spent, the vaccination program saved more than $5 in direct costs and approximately $11 in additional costs to society.”

Vaccines not only protect you but the people around you but this system can’t work if a majority of people aren’t vaccinated.  There can be false positives where maybe the vaccinations are reported to work but maybe in the end doesn’t but for the majority of vaccinations, they work and save lives.  There is no downside to doing something that can save your life.  Since you have weakened antibodies enter your body, you may feel cruddy for a few days but that sure beats contracting a the real disease.

Here: you can see just how effective vaccines have been in the US:

Percent Decrease in the US:

Measles: 99.9% Diphtheria: 100% Mumps: 98.7% Pertussis: 91.0% Smallpox: 100% Rubella: 99.9% Haemophilus influenzae type b, invasive: 99.8% Polio: 100% Tetanus: 98.6%

Sources Cited:

http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/vaccines/understanding/pages/vaccinebenefits.aspx

https://vaxplanations.wordpress.com/tag/vaccine/

http://www.vaccines.gov/more_info/features/five-important-reasons-to-vaccinate-your-child.html

Ebola was the topic of our last class not including our guest speaker and we learned the extreme fatality percentage (kills 25%-90% of all people with the virus) of everyone who contracts the virus.  This disease is a killer and anyone who treats a person with Ebola or tends to them in any way often times gets the virus themselves.  We saw that with Nina Pham, the nurse in Texas who contracted Ebola just by treating a patient but somehow the hospital did not follow regulations correctly.  We know how deadly Ebola is but what happens when you beat the odds?

“People who survive Ebola can lead normal lives post-recovery, though occasionally they can suffer inflammatory conditions of the joints afterwards” (Mary Beth Griggs)  What is going unnoticed in the news these days are the people who are immune to Ebola and those who have survived.  Anyone who survives the virus then becomes immune to that strain and this seems like the key to treating others with Ebola.  Once someone survives the virus, they can treat others with it without any consequences.  Clearly things can go wrong with people treating patients with Ebola because mistakes are bound to happen and they have in Texas and costed the life of a young nurse.

What we don’t know is if once surviving Ebola, are you immune from multiple strains or just one and no one knows how long immunity lasts.  If immunity does not last long then helping others would not be an option.  Survivors are also a key in treating patients because many hospitals are using survivors blood to make a serum for a blood transfusion with the antibodies to strengthen the immune response in the body and this is a very controversial treatment at the time as well.  Scientists and doctors also don’t even know if it works anyway.

Nancy Writebol is one survivor of the virus and she was asked to travel and help treat patients with the virus but after long talks with doctors at Emory, they decided without knowing how long immunity lasts and with many strains of the disease it was not the best idea for her.  Survivors of the virus still are the key to beating the disease because they are the center of the research on the disease because doctors and scientists are hoping they can synthesize antibodies in order to find a cure.  Hopefully soon we will find a cure and stop the outbreak that has been at the center of the news for months.  For more information about the virus check the CDC website here: http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/

Sources Cited:

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/what-happens-after-someone-survives-ebola?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=4&con=IMG

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/health/ebola-up-to-speed/index.html

Pepper, is Japan’s first affordable robot that can read emotion and “will be a platform for new apps” starting this February.  It’s hard to imagine a robot with human-like features ever existing but scientists in Japan are coming very close.  Decades ago people only dreamed of human-like robots and made cartoons like the Jetsons to predict what the world may look like one day.  It is crazy to think how much the world changes in just 50 years.  5o years ago we thought smoking cigarettes was healthy and doctors themselves were advertising for the benefit of smoking.

During a robotic play in Japan, Hiroshi Ishiguro, an artist turned engineer brought his human-like robot with hair skin and movements to watch.  Her name is Geminoid F and she sat in the front row to watch the production.  Adam Piore, the writer of Will Your Next Best Friend Be A Robot?: http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/will-your-next-best-friend-be-robot?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=1&con=IMG  sat in to watch that very play.  Geminoid F has many human like characteristics like looking, around, blinking and chest compressions mimicking breathing.  Geminoid F was panning and stopped and made eye contact with Adam and for a second Adam felt like the robot knew he was there and knew he was a person but then just kept panning away in awkward movements.  Ishiguro admits that Geminoid F is not perfect and has its issues.

Hiroshi Ishiguro has many “[Eerie] lifelike creations” in his laboratory at Osaka University and Geminoid F is the start of something great:

(Geminoid F with her human counterpart on the right)

Ishiguro said that most importantly his robot conveys “the illusion of life” and he said “My goal is not just to create a humanlike robot,” “but to understand the feeling of a presence. What is that? I want to understand what is a human, and what is a human likeness.”  And humans may forever be the only ones who understand presence but its crazy to think what will happen in the next 50 years considering we have lifelike human robots now.  Will we all have our own human-robot assistants? Will we make clones of ourselves?  Will these robots develop enough emotion to want to overthrow us as a race?  We will find out.

Works Cited:

http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/will-your-next-best-friend-be-robot?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=1&con=IMG

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/040310-geminoid-f-hiroshi-ishiguro-unveils-new-smiling-female-android

Throughout the 18 years of my life, I have always dreaded every doctors visit where I ended up having to get a vaccination or some kind of shot.  Its plain and simple they hurt and I do not prefer sharp objects going into my body; its just not very comfortable to most people.  For those people, the time has come for a change because “A team of researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a capsule coated in needles for patients to swallow, enabling the delivery of drugs directly into the stomach lining.” (Letzter) These doctors are experimenting and working on a pill that can replace all these repetitive, painful shots and vaccinations.

Doctors can now more efficiently dose patients with large amounts of antibodies when needed much like vaccinations.  These pills were tested on pigs to see the effectiveness of the medicine.  The pills are “Made of stainless steel, the pills contain a pool of insulin in the center and hollow needles on the outside, which pump insulin into the stomach, intestines, and colon over the course of a week.” (Letzter)  The pills are the size of big vitamins, approximately the size of a shirt button and as long as a thumbnail.

The picture below demonstrates the process of the pill:

The mouth is also completely safe because the needles are surrounded by a material that only dissolves when in the stomach.  Researchers examined the pigs after all the experiments and no damage whatsoever was found and they are continuing to keep safety as their number one priority.  The coolest part of this new discovery is that this not only is more comfortable but is a more effective way for the body to absorb the molecules from the injections.  In the pig experiment, insulin had a greater effect when taken with the pill than an injection under the skin.  The next step researchers are working on is a pill where the body can just squeeze out molecules like toothpaste.  These ideas are pretty revolutionary and sure would make it easier for me when getting vaccinations.

You can also find more material on the subject here: http://gizmodo.com/would-you-swallow-a-pill-covered-in-needles-instead-of-1641234428

Sources Cited:

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/pill-covered-needles-injects-you-drugs-inside-your-gut?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=3&con=IMG

For decades now globally, nations have been trying to find out how to obtain natural energy whether it be through water power, steam power, sun power, or wind power.  Wind mills have been a great method of natural energy but are hard to always use because they only work in places that are extremely windy and literally no place is windy 100% of the time.

In Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts a company called Altaeros Energies is working on BAT’s (buoyant airborne turbines).  These are enormous turbines that are traveling up to 2,000 feet where the winds are much more constant and strong. “There is more than enough energy in high-altitude winds to power all of civilization,” says Ken Caldeira, a Stanford University climate scientist, who co-authored a 2012 study that ballparked the potential at 1,800 terawatts.  We can extract endless energy from the skies and its just 2,000 feet away.  The only question is can we properly make technology to extract it and is it economically sound.

This enormous turbine is able to gather energy the moment it arrives and is pretty easy to set up as well.  Altaeros are looking into many sites in Alaska and have received a 740,000 dollar grant to demonstrate their product in the state.  The company is also looking into working on sites in India and Brazil.  “The company plans to start flying its first commercial-scale BAT, a 30-kilowatt system that could reduce diesel consumption by 11,000 gallons annually, near Fairbanks next year” (Popsci.com)  This could be one of the answers to our energy crisis.  If one of these machines can reduce 11,000 gallons a year imagine how many 10,000 could reduce (that’s actually 110,000,000 gallons if my math is correct).  You can read all about the company at their website http://www.altaerosenergies.com.

Currently the company is working strictly on their BAT and are looking toward the future of making much more green technology.  “The future of wind energy, it would seem, floats in our [Altaeros’s] fingertips.”

Works Cited:

http://www.altaerosenergies.com

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/quest-harness-wind-energy-2000-feet?dom=PSC&loc=slider&lnk=2&con=IMG

The age old question of what is the best way of drying hands is older than time itself, well it started with the invention of the electric hand dryer in 1948 by George Clemens.  When first analyzing this debate it seems really obvious that hand dryers clean and dry more efficiently and you don’t even have to touch anything (usually) to dry hands.  Actually its the other way around; according to info.debgroup.com (http://info.debgroup.com/blog/bid/297155/Paper-Towels-or-Hot-Air-Dryers-Which-is-Better-Why) paper towels sweep the floor when it comes to drying efficiently.

When analyzing how effective each method of drying is, you can’t just consider bacteria percentages; its much more than that.  You must consider timing, the way water is removed and overall cleanliness of the bathroom.  When I took Microbiology in my junior year of high school the first exercise we did was a lab where we learned how to wash our hands correctly and we were able to see with ultraviolet rays how well we did.  The key we learned to washing our hands was the scrubbing because it pushes bacteria off your hands.  This ultimately shows that using paper towels helps more with removal because of friction rather than just using hot air. “Many studies have found that friction is the key component in hand drying as it helps to remove contamination.” (info.debroup.com)

Besides removing more bacteria from peoples hands, paper towels are also a much quicker method when compared to a hand dryer.  After 15 seconds using a paper towel up to 99% of moisture was removed while with a hand dryer it takes 45 seconds just to remove 97% of moisture.  During hectic days no one has time to take a minute to dry hands left effectively with a hand dryer.

Lastly we consider where the bacteria from our hands go after we dry them.  With paper towels friction transfers the bacteria on to the towel and it is ultimately discarded in the trash while hand dryers blow hot air and transfer the bacteria all around the room and also spreads many of the fecal bacteria around that toilets flush up when they flush.  Overall paper towels are the superior way of drying hands but there is still a lot to consider with drying hands like cost of paper towels and the waste it produces but in this study they proved to be more effective and efficient.  And for those of you who don’t like those hand cranks for paper towels I was tought by my Microbiology teacher to crank you paper towels before you use the bathroom so after you wash your hands you don’t have to touch that surplus of bacteria.

Sources:

http://info.debgroup.com/blog/bid/297155/Paper-Towels-or-Hot-Air-Dryers-Which-is-Better-Why

My name is Ethan Asam and my junior year of high school I enrolled in Microbiology because my sister recommended it and the teacher was one of the best in the school.  Microbiology turned out to be one of the most interesting classes I have ever taken and it really sparked my interest when it came to science.  Gram Staining and looking at bacteria and diseases just amazed me.      (ECOLI)

I heard great things about Science 200 when signing up for my classes so I thought like Microbiology that Science 200 could really get my attention and spark my interest.  I don’t plan on majoring in the Sciences because during high school I learned that my skills in Chemistry were god awful.  Mols just didn’t like me it was that simple.  I also really enjoyed biology yet it was really challenging to me to figure out cellular respiration and photosynthesis.  People often have also thought of me as a business man so I feel that my skills suit a business major more than a science major.  You can learn what sparked my interest in science by clicking here.