I remember in middle school the first I ever ran the mile my gym teacher told me to try to control my breathing by breathing in through my nose and breathing out through my mouth. I never really understood why I was supposed to do that or even if it was the right way because I always struggled when I had to run a lot and lost my breath even when I was breathing the “right” way. I decided I want to look into the right way of breathing while running to see if there even is a right way or is it just preference.

 A study done by Rob Wood at the American College of Sports Medicine was done to see whether it was better to breathe through the mouth or better to breathe through the nose. The way they did this study was by putting together a sample of 14 moderately trained males and females to have them run on a treadmill with increasing difficulty and using oral breathing as the control group. They forced the control group to breath through their mouths by using a nose clip to prevent them from using their nose and they taped the variable group by taping their mouth shut so that they were forced to breathe through their nose. The way they measured the effectiveness of each method was by open circuit spirometry, which is a way to measure air capacity of the lungs. By running these tests they were able to measure four different variables, max oxygen intake, exercise ventilation, arterial oxygen saturation, and the rate of perceived breathing. The results showed that there wasn’t much difference in the method of breathing between oral and nasal in three out of the four variables. The only variable that there was a significant difference was exercise ventilation, which differed about 35% in favor of oral breathing. The reason why this happened is simply because the mouth can take in more air than the nose. The results concluded that there wasn’t enough difference in the variables to link positively say which one is favorable which led Rob Wood to believe that there were other variables that affected arterial oxygen saturation.

After going through Rob Wood’s study I came to the conclusion that is there is no specific right or wrong way to breathe while running as long as your getting sufficient amount of oxygen. It is up to preference and how your body is trained to breathe, however breathing through the mouth does get more oxygen into your body so it might be a preferred method when we are running out of breath and need more oxygen fast.

This world has become a world that loves to see data and information that can be measured and compared. This has changed the way we look at a lot of things like businesses, sports, and most importantly, education. This data-driven world has led our country to create the No Child Left Behind Act, which many say has worsened the country’s already struggling education system. A poll taken last year by Key Subgroups came out with results that illustrated the public’s pessimistic view on this act. Out of all the people that were surveyed, 48% of people that claimed to be very familiar with the law said that it has made education in the United States.

A report of done by the Center on Education Policy has also shown that how the progress of the United States education is heading in the wrong direction. Their most recent report indicates that nearly half of the public schools in the US did not reach the scores needed to make adequate yearly progress in 2011, which was the worst performance ever recorded. The percentage of schools that did not reach adequate yearly progress has been increasing since 2006 when it was at 29%.

Now I will explain some of the reasons why this program is even in place considering all of the negativity it has been receiving. The No Child Left Behind act was put in place in 2002 which requires all 50 states to perform standardized testing in order to show student achievement and most importantly in the government’s eyes, teacher performance. The main point of this act in my eyes is to put pressure on teachers to be better. However, I believe that this forces teachers to stray away from the right curriculum to teach students about pointless standardized tests so that they don’t face the chance of getting fired. I think that it is unfair to children to learn meaningless information just so that the government has data on student achievement in areas that are not important and completely irrelevant. I also believe that most of the standardized tests are not actually measuring intelligence but the ability to take tests. The reason why I believe that is because most of these tests are multiple choice and if a child is taught how to eliminate some answers then they have a better chance at guessing and might get the problem right without actually knowing the information. This is rewarding students for guessing and not for intelligence.

I think that our education system has to be changed because although it might not have a big impact today, it will eventually because the kids in school today are tomorrow’s leader and their ability to take a test is not going to get them far in life. I don’t know for sure how they can change this system but I have a few ideas. One would be to take these tests out completely so that teachers aren’t pressured to teach irrelevant subjects and focus more on the curriculum deemed important by the state or the district. Another idea would be to change the structure of the standardized tests so that they reward students for their actual intelligence. My last one would be to remove the current rewards some schools receive for doing well and also remove some of the punishments that schools receive for doing poorly. The reason why I came up with these is because I feel that these would be ways to actually make students more intelligent or measure their actual intelligence and not their ability to take tests.

I have never put much thought into this topic but since we had a class on animals being gay, it has intrigued me and I want to find out if there is an accepted answer. Before I get into studies that have been done I want to share my thoughts on this topic. My thinking is that homosexuality is not linked to genes because of basic evolutionary thinking. The reason why I think that is because in order for humans to pass on their genes they have to have a child and it is not very easy for homosexuals to do this, even though it is possible today it is not very common due to high prices and small number of participants. This leads me to think that if genes caused homosexuality, the gene would eventually become extinct because they are not being passed onto their offspring. This is an article that further explains evolutionary thinking of homosexuality. The reason why I became interested in this topic is because I am a twin and there have been studies done to try to sort out this debate by doing studies on identical twins since we share a lot of similarities in terms of genes.

In the first half 1900’s there was a theory that homosexuality was caused by genes because they were studied in mental hospitals where people had mental and physical defects which led psychologists to believe that homosexuality was a defect. In the early 1950’s a geneticist Franz Kallman put together a study of 85 pairs identical and fraternal twins where at least one of the twins claimed to be homosexual. The reason why he chose to study identical and fraternal twins is because identical twins share a lot of genes so that if one were homosexual then there would be a high chance of the other twin being homosexual. However, fraternal twins shares as many genes as regular brothers and sisters so they don’t have as high a chance as being homosexual if the other twin is, in theory. Kellman found out that if one identical twin was homosexual then there was a 100% chance that the other identical twin was homosexual too.  This lead him to believe that homosexuality was indeed caused by genetics.

Although it may seem like this study proves that homosexuality is caused by genetics there were some flaws in his study. First of all, Kellman used a lot of participants that were in correctional and psychiatric facilities so it could be said that his participants are not like the average person. Another flaw was that he never explained how he determined whether the pair of twins were identical or fraternal so there is a chance that he could have skewed the results in order to falsely show that homosexuality is caused by genetics. And lastly even if the study was done correctly, it would be hard to determine whether or not homosexuality is caused by genes in identical twins because a majority of the time, identical twins grow up sharing the same experiences and they are raised almost the same. I can say that from my own experience my twin brother and me share many of our experiences because we do a lot together, and I would even say that we do a lot more things together than normal siblings. After the study was done, researchers that looked over Kellman’s study came to the conclusion that the chance of both identical twins being homosexual was closer to around 50%.

I think the best way to test this theory would be to do a correlation study between identical twins that have been raised by different families in different settings. This would be very difficult though because it would be hard to find a large sample size of identical homosexual twins that grew up apart.

After looking at this study I have come to my own conclusion that although homosexuality may be linked to genetics, it is without a doubt affected by social and environmental factors. The reason why I think that is because even though someone may be homosexual they might not admit to it because of societal factors that keep them from admitting it.

Source: Cooper, Edith Fairman. Homosexuality: Selected Studies and Review of Possible Origins, Science Policy Research Division (CRS), April 15, 1993.

In case some of you don’t know what a sensory deprivation chamber is I will do my best to explain it, but if you want a more in depth here’s a great website. A sensory deprivation chamber is like a bathtub that closes you in with the water being extremely concentrated with salt so that the person can float. The idea of the chamber is to block out our senses so that all that we can do in the chamber is relax and think. Supposedly the chamber is supposed to relieve stress. There was a recent study done at the Human Performance Laboratory at Karlstad University of 140 participants with long-term conditions related to stress to see if the sensory deprivation chamber actually reduces stress after 12 treatments. The way they measured the stress was by measuring stress related pain and anxiety. The results were generally positive with around a quarter of the participants sleeping better, reducing stress, feeling less agony and feeling less depressed or not depressed at all after 12 treatments. The study confirmed that by using the sensory deprivation chamber, users could improve their sleeping patterns, which could lead to less stress and a better life. The thing that was the most interesting was that even after 4 months after the treatment ended, some participants still felt the benefits.

Even though the study did show promising results that the Sensory Deprivation Chamber reduced stress, I still find it hard to believe that floating in a dark bath can reduce stress. The reason why I find this hard to believe is because most of these stress-related issues are mental issues that could be caused by the way the person thinks. What I think happens is that people go into treatment really believing that it will really help their condition and that changes the way they think which in the end makes them better. The reason why I think that is because I’ve heard many times that stress is how you handle a situation and the way a person views a situation has a huge impact on how they handle it so if they can look at situations differently, then they feel less stress. It seems like a farfetched process but our brains go through much more complicated processes on a daily basis so to me this seems very possible.

Today in many different types of media like movies and TV shows, smart characters are usually portrayed as socially awkward and shy. What I would like to know is that if people with higher IQ’s actually have less social skills than people with lower IQ’s. There weren’t many articles on this specific topic, however there was one that I found pretty intriguing. This article explains why some intelligent people have struggles in being shy or socially awkward. The person who wrote the article doesn’t do any research or conduct any study so all of this could be due to chance since all of this is from his/her own experience of helping people.

The article claims that smart people tend to struggle in life because of a few things: smart people are information driven and not skill driven, they think too much, they freak themselves out as a result of thinking too much, and they are unsuccessful at dealing with their emotions. These all seem like possible struggles of intelligent people, however there is a big problem–it is very difficult to test these theories with accuracy and honesty from participants.

I came up with an idea on how to test this topic of whether or not there is a connection between intelligence and social ability. Since the best way to prove something in science is by controlling one variable and manipulating the other I came to the conclusion that it would be better to manipulate social ability and control intelligence. The reason why I chose this way is because I can’t think of any ethical ways to alter someone’s IQ. Even though intelligence may be affecting social ability testing like this can prove or disprove the connection because if there is a correlation then social activity affects intelligence. If there isn’t correlation, then there is a higher statistical chance that intelligence affects social ability–that is if the study was well done and was random and large enough so that it lessens probability of chance.

To measure social ability you would have to have different social situations and have a way to measure the participants’ performance. Once you have the results of their performance you can test the participants’ intelligence with a simple IQ test and then analyze the results to see if there is a strong correlation between the intelligence and social ability.

Even under all of the right circumstances, I still think that this would be difficult to say for sure that intelligent people do or don’t struggle socially because there can be so many third variables, like wealth or age, that could cause the participants to be socially awkward or shy. Even after all of this it could all be due to chance because I’m sure that there are people that don’t have extremely high IQ’s that are socially awkward. So in conclusion, I think that in this current day there is no way to positively prove that there is a correlation between intelligence and social ability. The only thing we could base this off of is anecdotes like the article from earlier in this post.

Growing up, chewing gum always seemed to have a negative image tied to it for whatever reason. My question is if it has anything to do health or was it just disrespectful or a nuisance to others. During middle school is when gum really started to get big when I was growing up and that was when I first started to realize its negative image. The reason I think that happened during middle school was because a lot of kids had braces and I know from personal experience that gum can break your braces, which isn’t cheap to fix so I can see why parents might not like their kids chewing gum. However, I want to know if it has a direct effect on your dental health, not on your dental appearance as a cause of braces.

The American Dental Association (ADA) has a webpage that claims that there have been clinical studies done that show that chewing sugarless gum after a meal for about 20 minutes can help prevent tooth decay. The reason why this happens is because chewing gum stimulates the creation of saliva in your mouth. And although it may seem like a pointless thing it actually isn’t because saliva has the ability to get rid of certain decay causing bacteria among other things. All different kinds of gum have the ability to stimulate the creation of saliva, however the sugarless gum is the one that has the most benefit because it doesn’t have sugar that the bacteria thrive on and eventually leads to teeth decay causing all different types of dental problems. The sugarless gum contains non-cavity causing sweeteners, which prevent the bacteria from causing tooth decay.

My final conclusion on this is that when it comes to dental health in terms of tooth decay, chewing gum is not negative; it is in fact a good thing. However, chewing gum should not take place of daily dental care because it does not provide all of the benefits of brushing and flossing, etc. If you are in a rush and don’t have time to brush your teeth, popping in a piece of gum and chewing it for a while could be helpful. The ADA recommends chewing gum with the ADA seal to assure you that it is beneficial to your dental health and not causing harm.