Author Archives: Jeffrey R Nelson

Crows are smarter than you think…

As human beings, we distinguish ourselves from other animal species of our planet because of our highly developed cognitive abilities that enabled sentient intelligence.  There is no doubt that the human race as a species is the most cognitively advanced species on this planet because of our physical characteristics that we enable with the use of our expanded intelligence.  One of the reasons our brains evolved this way was because our earliest evolutionary ancestors used crude tools to give themselves survival advantages.  Things like sharpening a rock into an arrowhead to use for hunting, or sparking flint to make fire.  These little actions created advancements in our neural networks of our brain and has such continued for millennia through generations allowing the human brain to get to the point that it is at today.

However, just because we have the most developed brain does not mean we are the only animal species who use tools to fulfill needs.  In fact, there are a very small percentage of animal species that have cognitive abilities that allow them to develop skills such as using crude tools.  A new study claims that an endangered species of Hawaiian crow, known as the Alala, can efficiently use sticks as tools.  Now this is not very surprising because it has long been known that some species of crows have the ability to use tools for themselves.  As more species of crows are being discovered to have this shared trait as a natural characteristic of their behavior, it is now being assumed that this is a natural evolutionary trait for crows and not just a consequence of crows being kept in captivity.

The study was being conducted on the endangered species of the Hawaiian crow while 115 Alala were being kept in captivity, because they are extinct in the wild.  The biologists who care for the Alala and conducted this research plan to release captive Alala’s back into the wild at a rate of 12 birds per year for the next four years, in an attempt to save and restore the species back to existence in natural habitats.

Gaia Satellite Sends First Images of Milky Way Map

I consider myself to be a lover of science, even before I took this class, which is why I knew I needed to sign up for this course once I first found out about it.  I remember in one of the lectures in our first week, Andrew was discussing ‘science’s most amazing discovery: the fact that we exist.  There was a few things about this lecture that I liked, and it really got me excited for this semester to have Andrew as a professor for a class like this, and not some cranky old know-it-all professor.  As Andrew was progressing through this existence lecture he came to a point that I found to be fascinating and profound: you exist in a tiny part of a huge hostile universe.  This is something that I was already aware of from past experiences with astronomy classes and learning from curiosity.

Fast forward to this week, when I am looking on Google News page for some good news stories and come across this headline about the first map of the Milky Way Galaxy.  Initially I was skeptical about how this could actually be possible and whether or not this map was based on physical observations, or just a hypothetical creation based on mathematical theories and formulas.  It turns out that there actually is a satellite, positioned in a gravitationally locked orbit directly opposite of the earth’s location in its orbit around the sun.  This was shocking to me that I had never heard about this satellite before, but it apparently had launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency and it is called the Gaia Satellite.

Gaia’s mission is to attempt to map the massive structure that is the Milky Way Galaxy which is approximately 100,000 light years across.  Although there are believed to be over 300 billion stars in the milky way galaxy alone, the Gaia team obviously doesn’t expect to map and measure every single star individually, much less the myriad of planets, moons, and asteroids that undoubtedly occupy the interstellar space in the vastness of our galaxy.  The team more realistically expects that an observation of at least 1 billion stars will give them enough data and information to learn more about our galaxy like its structure, formation, and history.  As of now, the satellite has actually surpassed expectations, and has measured approximately 1.142 billion stars and is still going!  This is the first image Gaia has sent back and is expected to be the first of many more to come:

gaia

Is smoking pot really harmless?

In one of our recent lectures the discussion was centered around tobacco and whether or not smoking is bad for you.  I thought the lecture was interesting because we learned more about the public perception of alcohol decades ago and how it has changed today.  The acceptance of cigarette smoking throughout adults in American society was pushed on the public by tobacco companies and doctors themselves which is crazy to think about.  Perhaps the most important reason this lecture resonated with me is because both of my mother’s parents, my grandfather and grandmother happened to pass away earlier than expected due to health conditions that were likely caused by their tobacco smoking habits.  One point of the lecture that stuck out for me was when Andrew revealed that studies done on men who smoked showed the lag-time between cigarette consumption and development of lung cancer to be 20 years apart.  This was surprising to me because of the fact that Andrew pointed out that we know that there are many cases where regular cigarette smokers develop lung cancer later on in life, and there is enough data to support this idea as evidence of a correlation, but the problem is that there still is no known mechanism for what specifically causes people who smoke tobacco to develop lung cancer.  It is so widely assumed that smoking causes lung cancer that it is practically perceived as fact, when most people don’t even realize we don’t know WHY smoking causes lung cancer, we just accept that to be true because that’s what statistical data from scientific studies portray to us as evidence.

After this lecture was over I got to thinking about whether or not a phenomenon similar to this instance of tobacco smoking could be true for a different drug, and naturally I thought of the most commonly used recreational drug in America today, cannabis.  Cannabis is such a taboo subject because of all the new progress that has been made in scientific applications of the medical benefits of the cannabis plant. In America today there are 25 states that have legalized medical marijuana and even Washington D.C.!  Yet one of the most common arguments against legalization of cannabis is that the dangers of smoking pot at a young age are detrimental to the mental development of young adults.  For years this had just been a narrative pushed onto public opinion in different ways by different industries and organizations (like alcohol and tobacco companies, pharmaceutical corporations) and government bodies (DEA, FDA, etc.), but there was not really any hard scientific evidence to support this claim.  Recently I came across an article that proposed a reason as to why there might be merit to this age-old claim after all.

A new study conducted by researchers from Osaka University in Japan suggests that cannabis use at a young age can interfere with the development of brain connections.  The study determined that the human body has its own system of cannabinoids called endocannabinoids that are crucial to the development of neural connections.  The study suggests that smoking cannabis can be detrimental to this development, and furthermore addresses an even older question of how neural circuits in the brain are developed.  As a young human ages the brain undergoes major structural changes before maturing, and during this time the synapses (number and arrangement of connections between neurons) are restructured. This study found that this development process occurs in 2 stages; the first stage entails strengthening and creating new synapses, while the next stage involves a process known as synaptic pruning which essentially involves shedding unneeded synapses so that new neural circuits can be reorganized.  In order to study how this process is affected by cannabis the researchers used newborn mice and utilized fluorescent proteins to analyze neural activity in the brain of the mice, examining the development of thalamocortical axons (TCAs), which are nerve fibers that connect the neurons of the thalamus to the cortex.

As the study progressed, researchers observed new TCAs running from the thalamus to the cortex, however after a number of days this halted, and the synaptic pruning process began.  This shift of synaptic processes was due to an increase of type 1 cannabinoid receptors, thus implying that endocannabinoids are a key component in synaptic pruning.  In order to validate this speculation, the researchers used new mice who were genetically modified to lack CBR1s, and then delivered doses of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol – the psychoactive component in marijuana) into the brains of the mice and found that THC binds to CBR1s and interferes with proper synaptic formation.  The researchers concluded that because this synaptic formation process occurs during adolescence for humans that excessive consumption of cannabis (THC) for young people can cause cognitive impairment due to the potential lack of creation of new neural synapses, and accelerating the synaptic pruning process way before the brain is fully matured.

The conclusion of this study really intrigues me, because it really sheds new light on the age-old argument: is pot really bad for you?  Being completely honest, I know look back on my days in high school and in college and think about the times I’ve used marijuana before, and it really got me thinking about the real effects of this drug.  There is so much information and opinions out there about the true nature of cannabis, and this one study just made me further question the legitimacy of the “pot is harmless” argument.  I am fully in favor of the legalization of cannabis for its potential medical, and industrial applications as a natural resource, but I am not so inclined to believe that recreational cannabis consumption is truly “harmless” just because nobody has directly died from overdosing on THC.  In the future I really hope that the governing legislative bodies and executive agencies thoroughly assess this issue to try and make light of the situation and try to learn more about this fascinating plant.

Hope this post is not too long…

Hello SC 200!  My name is Jeff Nelson, and I am back in Happy Valley for my 5th year at PSU (decided to stay because I like it here so much!) In all seriousness though, I am back this year because I have yet to fulfill the degree requirements for my second major which is IST, my first major is Philosophy.  Now you may be wondering how the hell I came up with that combination of majors (and I often ask myself the same question), and it’s an interesting story, however a little too long to share here.  Long story short, I declared my Philosophy major with an option in Professional Studies with the intention of choosing a second major or a minor once I transferred from Altoona campus to University Park campus.  In my first semester at UP I took IST 110 as an elective and I knew that that was the major for me to complement the one I already declared.  I guess in some ways, IST could be considered a science major, but a fair argument could be made in opposition of that stance.  I like to consider the majors within the College of IST to be overlapping in some sense but also unique in their own sense as well.  For instance, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is a heavily scientific major, but components of this major overlap with the different options of an Information Sciences and Technology (IST) which takes some aspects of technical and scientific concepts of CSE and applies that to understand its implications in the world of business, and that is why I chose IST.

I am taking this course because (as I said before) this is my 5th year of college so I only have 4 classes that I have to take over this Fall and next Spring semester to fulfill my degree requirements… hello senior year electives.  So I googled “best electives at University Park” and an Onward State article came up “Top 10 electives at University Park”, sure enough SC 200 was at the top of the list, so I decided to give it a shot.  I consider myself to enjoy science and learning about new concepts and ideas, but I never had the mental capacity to handle the complex technical knowledge that higher-education science entails.  I like to read scientific magazines and watch educational documentaries/TV shows, but I never had the ability to sit through college courses and get graded on my actual comprehension of the material, so when I found out about this class I knew it was right up my alley, and I have a feeling some of my fellow classmates may feel the same way!

As far as the live link goes for this blog post, I wasn’t sure what link to use for this post because it is not required to be about anything scientific necessarily, but I wanted to link to something meaningful.  So I decided to link to the website for this analytics application my friend from high school created.  The software product is a cloud-based web platform that is called Flow, and this link takes you to the website where you can register and sign up to try out using it for free.  The technology behind the software is really quite impressive and has the potential to be ground-breaking because of its myriad of various potential uses.  I figured there may be someone in this class who reads this post and checks out this link because it may actually be of use to them if you are looking to become a young entrepreneur/businessperson, or if you know someone close to you who is one, or is in charge of a business that might be interested in this product.  If you are interested and want to learn more about the product Flow, here is a link to the LinkedIn & Twitter pages of the startup company 4DIQ which was launched to manage the product and to provide consulting services to clients and customers.

For my picture, I leave you with the best science-related meme I could think of…

science bitch