In my last post, I began analyzing over-the-counter drugs. Should you take these kinds of drugs, considering the risk of the damaging effects they can have, or should you try to avoid them at all costs?

I talked about the risk of liver damage excessive acetaminophen could cause. This ingredient is common in many over-the-counter drugs, especially Tylonel. But there are other kinds of OTC drugs that are pain relievers and fever reducers as well – for example, Aspirin, Advil, Aleve, Motrin, and others, labeled as ibuprofen, ketoprofen, and nanoproxen.

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, are found in these types of drugs. As with any medication, there is a chance of potential risk. In this case, NSAIDS are known to cause damage to the inside of the stomach, creating ulcers. NSAIDS have also been known to worsen blood pressure and cause reversible damage to the kidneys.

How serious are these effects? When taken daily, especially excessively, over long periods of time, “there is an increased risk of gastrointestinal complications ranging from stomach pain to ulcers” as well as “severe and potentially deadly gastrointestinal problems.” A study analyzing 43 generally healthy patients taking NSAIDS/aspirin daily for their arthritis found that “71 percent of those who were exposed to NSAIDs for more than 90 days had visible injury to their small intestine.” The long term side-effects of NSAID use cause nearly 103,000 hospitalizations and 16,500 deaths each year. In addition, “more people die each …year from NSAIDs-related complications than from AIDS and cervical cancer in the United States.” I was not able to find the specific background on the study or statistics to evaluate their value, but if we can believe what they are saying to be accurate, NSAIDS effects are pretty serious.

Even though there are negative effects to taking an excessive amount of NSAIDS, many people do take these drugs despite the risks because, as rheumatologist John Klippel, MD, President and CEO of the Arthritis Foundation said: “pain is not just an inconvenience, it can be devastating. It can destroy people’s lives. NSAIDs can be a valuable treatment.”

Both Tylonel and Advil, ibphrofen, Aleve, Aspirin, Motrin, etc. have pros and cons to them that make the question “should you take OTC medicine or should you avoid it?” a touchy question to answer. Both kinds of drugs have risks to them when taken in excessive amounts, but do the risks really outweigh the benefits? In the case of acetaminophen and to a certain extent, NSAIDS, taking the drugs over the maximum dose increases the risk of negative effects such as liver damage, stomach ulcers, kidney damage, etc, not necessarily the damage itself. NSAIDS can cause more serious long term damage, but if you follow the instructions use it accordingly, you should not run into this problem.

Considering this, and weighing the positive benefits that OTC drugs offer, I think that people should not avoid using them as long as they use them safely. They do help – anyone who has had a fever reduced, their sinuses reduced, or a migraine cured because of them will attest. People should not avoid using them, but they still should be wary, only using them when necessary and never in excessive amounts. As the FDA says, “the best way to take your over-the-counter pain reliever? Seriously.”

There is a lot of negative information out there about OTC drugs, so I understand why many people would be deterred and not want to use them at all. There are holistic alternatives to OTC drugs, but these come in the form as supplements and are not as popular. I couldn’t find a study comparing the effects of both methods, but I believe there has not been a big movement from OTC drugs to holistic supplements because people find it harder to believe it will work. With OTC drugs, there is some element of placebo because you know so many other people have had success with them you will too.

Based on the information about acetaminophen and NSAIDS, do you think the negatives of OTC drugs should prevent them from being used? Should people be more wary of them?

No matter what kind of over the counter medicine you are taking, it is important to be aware of the following:

�         how much you can take at one time (dose)

�         how many hours you must wait before taking another dose

�         how many times you can take it each day

�         when you should not take it and talk to your doctor

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111123706.htm

http://www.webmd.com/osteoarthritis/features/are-nsaids-safe-for-you?page=2

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/EmergencyPreparedness/BioterrorismandDrugPreparedness/ucm133421.htm

http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/features/safe-use-otc-pain-relievers

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/04/pain-relievers-the-pros-and-cons-of-4/index.htm

http://www.spine-health.com/treatment/pain-medication/potential-risks-and-complications-nsaids

http://www.fda.gov/Drugs/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/BuyingUsingMedicineSafely/UnderstandingOver-the-CounterMedicines/SafeUseofOver-the-CounterPainRelieversandFeverReducers/ucm234272.htm

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/PainManagement/story?id=731159&page=1

Medicine: A Good or Bad thing?

As far as I knew growing up, I thought taking over-the-counter painkillers for your sickness/pain needs was a universally accepted practice. It wasn’t uncommon in my house to ask for a tylenol when you had a headache, motrin when you had a fever, etc.

It wasn’t until this year that I met people who try to avoid medicine as much as they can. I met people, a doctor and a nurse, who told me they don’t believe in medicine for day to day issues. They believe that the human body is very resilient and can take care of itself. My roommates, having been raised the same way, rarely take any medicine unless they absolutely have to. Interestingly enough, they rarely have to at all.

I am the opposite – when I feel a headache brewing, which happens kind of frequently I guess because of my allergies, I take a Tylenol without even thinking about it.

“Three-fifths of the medications purchased in the United States are nonprescription over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, widely viewed as a cost-effective segment of personal health care” – that number tells me that I am not alone in my practice. Should I start thinking twice every time I take over-the-counter medicine like my roommates, or should they not be afraid of taking over-the-counter medicine when they need it?

This post, I will focus on the common over-the-counter drug ingredient, acetaminophen. In my next/follow-up post, I will focus on analyzing nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs which are found in Aspirin, Advil, Motrin, and Aleve among other medications.

People take over-the-counter drugs all the time. They take them as pain relievers and fever reducers, as cures for coughs and colds, as a solution to aches, cramps, and discomfort. And they help. According to the consumer goods tracker Information Resources Inc., “Drug stores, supermarkets and mass merchandisers like Target and Kmart sold more than $2 billion worth of over-the-counter pain medicine in the past year.” OTC drugs are popular and offer convenience and results to consumers. Based on this information, it makes sense to use these types of drugs when you need them.

Too much of a good thing, however, can be bad, which is why a lot of controversy has surrounded OTC drugs in the past few years till now. Within the last two years, the FDA had recommended a ban on all prescription pain relievers containing the ingredient acetaminophen. This is concerning as acetaminophen is the number one ingredient in the OTC pain reliever Tylenol. The panel also proposed “lowering the amount of acetaminophen in over-the-counter medication like Tylenol from 500 milligrams to 325, which could cap the maximum daily dose at 2,600 milligrams.” Apparently, the reason for this was because “about 400 Americans die and 42,000 more visit the ER because of acetaminophen overdoses, which can lead to liver damage.” Since many OTC products contain acetaminophen, this makes overdosing not hard to do if an uneducated person is self-medicating.

Liver damage is a word that has been floating around acetaminophen since it came out. To get to the point of risk of liver damage however, one would have to take more than 8 pills of Tylonel, or exceed 4000 milligrams of acetaminophen, within a twenty-four hour period. That is a lot of tylonel, which is why Sandra Kweder, M.D., deputy director of the Office of New Drugs in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) insists that “there is no immediate danger to patients who take these combination pain medications and they should continue to take them as directed by their health care provider.”

Continue reading my next post where I will analyze another type of OTC ingredient and then make a conclusion based on the evidence I have found. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111123706.htm

http://painresource.com/living-well/pain-relievers/death-of-a-painkiller/

http://www.diversalertnetwork.org/medical/articles/DAN_Takes_a_Look_at_Over-the-Counter_Medications

http://www.webmd.com/pain-management/features/safe-use-otc-pain-relievers

http://www.webmd.com/osteoarthritis/features/are-nsaids-safe-for-you

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/PainManagement/story?id=731159&page=1

Do you live longer if you don’t eat meat?

After reading the blog posts by Anushi about Vegans, vs. Vegetarians vs. Carnivores, I was doing some reading and found an article that suggested that vegetarians live longer than people who eat meat.

 According to a recent study, researchers found that a vegetarian diet was associated with a reduced death rate. The study observed “all-cause and cause-specific mortality in a group of 73,308 men and women Seventh-day Adventists“.  They used a questionnaire to categorize participants based on five groups: “nonvegetarian, semi-vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian (includes seafood), lacto-ovo-vegetarian (includes dairy and egg products) and vegan (excludes all animal products).” This association was more obvious in men than women, with women’s results showing no specific reductions in mortality.

In the end, the study found that there was an association but not an established relationship between a vegetarian diet and lower mortality rates. It did note, however, that “vegetarian groups tended to be older, more highly educated and more likely to be married, to drink less alcohol, to smoke less, to exercise more and to be thinner.“

Even though the study had a great sample size, the results only represented Seventh Day Adventists. Why did the study do this? Only surveying Seventh Day Adventists means you don’t get the results for other religions that people practice, and so can only make conclusions about these Christian Protestants. Only surveying Seventh Day Adventists does help us to narrow one more variable to get closer to an answer about diet verses mortality rates.

Another problem, admitted in the study, is that the “analysis is limited by relatively early follow-up. If dietary patterns affect mortality, they may do so with moderate effect sizes, via complex pathways, and with long latency periods.”

The fact that they also found correlations between education, marriage, alcohol intake, activeness, etc, I don’t think we can gather from this study that vegetarian diet leads to lower mortality rates. It seems that vegetarians tend to live a healthier lifestyle overall, so there are too many confounding variables to know for sure.

There have been other studies done however that can give us more concrete answers. In 2005, a German study “compared mortality in German Vegetarians and health-conscious persons in a 21-year followup.” By comparing healthy/health-conscious meat eaters, the study conductors narrowed down variables to find what was the healthiest. As “vegetarians tend not to smoke, drink alcohol or indulge in sugar and highly processed foods,” the results will be naturally skewed to show reduced mortality rates in vegetarians when compared to meat-eaters who follow a typical western diet.  The important conclusion of this study was that “it was other factors–low prevalence of smoking and moderate or high levels of physical activity–that were associated with reduced overall mortality, not the vegetarian diet.”

Even if vegetarianism isn’t proven to reduce mortality rates, it could play a part in reducing other health risks. “The largest study ever conducted in the UK” analyzed 45,000 volunteers from England and Scotland and compared rates of heart disease between people who practiced vegetarianism and people who didn’t. This study, after tracking participants for nearly 20 years, found that vegetarians are 28% less likely to develop heart disease. The study did say that “researchers found that vegetarians had lower blood pressures and cholesterol levels than non-vegetarians, which is thought to be the main reason behind their reduced risk of heart disease.” Even though this study surveyed how healthy each participant considered their lifestyle to be, there are still possible confounding variables that could explain this reduced rate of heart disease – vegetarians being more likely to exercise and less likely to smoke, for instance.

After reading these studies, I feel as though I can’t trust the results because there are so many other variables that come into play. In addition to the fact that vegetarians are more likely to live a healthier lifestyle, there are also the variables in the participants’ diets and the range from unhealthy to healthy that is being compared. For example, as the German study considered, there are both healthy and unhealthy vegetarians as well as healthy and unhealthy meat eaters. Even just comparing healthy vegetarians and healthy meat eaters, there is the problem of the different type of diet. For example, a healthy meat eater could be following a Mediterranean diet; the meat they could be eating may be limited to chicken or include other read meat, etc. There are many variations in a vegetarian diet as well, which leaves the idea that you live longer if you don’t eat meat hard to prove.

I think that it is not a death sentence to include meat in your diet, as long as you live a healthy lifestyle. What do you think? Do you think people should focus on a vegetarian diet because there seems to be nothing to lose but something, however hard it seems to prove in research, to gain?

Sources: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/vegetarians-death-premature-longevity-live-longer_n_3380781.html

http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1691919

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/tjnj-vda053013.php

http://www.westonaprice.org/vegetarianism-and-plant-foods/not-to-go-vegetarian

 ttp://www.aicr.org/press/health-features/nutrition-notes/nn-is-vegetarian-healthier.html

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2013/130130.html

In so many ways, technology makes our life easier. Anything we want to know (or want to buy) is at our fingertips. Computers, smartphones, and tablets – all of them have played a part in helping us become more efficient, right? Or have they?

As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from Psychologytoday.com puts it, “Life has become more complex but we hardly ever notice it because technology has made complexity simpler than ever”. Technology has changed the way we order food, the way we do business, the way we communicate, and the way we learn. There are apps/websites for nearly every restaurant, so that with a click of a button food shows up right at your doorstep. To swipe credit cards, people now use devices such as “Square,” which plugs into your smartphone’s headphone jack processes credit cards. There are apps/websites where you can create flashcards to study and computer games designed to help us learn. We are exposed to so much information through the television, internet, and our smartphones, which leads me to believe that we have adapted to process all this information faster and more efficiently. Is there any proof to this however? And if we are able to process more information faster, is this making us smarter?

This TIME magazine article looks at different studies regarding the effect of different technologies and summarizes some of the studies I am about to discuss. The TIME article talks about how technology helps us consume information faster, but does this mean we are actually learning the information?

Intelligence is defined as the “ability to think and learn: the ability to learn facts and skills and apply them”.

Look at the technology of “auto-correct”. We use it every day, it makes the task of texting faster, but is it actually improving our cognitive skills? In a 2009 study, 317 7^th graders were recruited from 20 different schools. The students completed a series of three cognative tests (specifically  “an exposure questionnaire based on the Interphone study, a computerised cognitive test battery, and the Stroop colour-word test“), and after adjusting for errors, it was found that “overall, mobile phone use was associated with faster and less accurate responding to higher level cognitive tasks”. Because of the amount of participants and the fact they adjusted for errors, I would say the results have value. Read more here. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644978

Technology delivers the facts to us and we interpret them, but the ease with which we can obtain these facts makes us more likely not to retain them. In 2011, Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University did a study on the effect of search engines and the way they change how we use our memories. She did a series of experiments that tested the participants’ memories for information based on different ways to find the information. They seemed to be well conducted but she did not include if she chose her participants. Read about the specifics of each of the four experiments here.

Based on the experiment, she found that when people expect to have access to information, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it”. This means that Sparrow’s study concluded that “the Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves”. In other words, we are not absorbing more knowledge, we are banking on it to be stored somewhere and easily accessed.

Look at the example of this class – during the first blog period, many of us didn’t get an amazing grade because we just reported facts we found on the internet and were less inclined to think critically. Andrew even pondered that this was an effect technology may have had, saying “I worry that the Facebook generation is not used to the idea of serious work being posted on line.“

Let’s go to the root of learning – schools. Do teachers think that technology help improves learning? The general consensus is that teachers find technology is helpful to students. It increases their engagement nd helps them to visualize things. “Why Teacher’s Should Use Education Technology” by Jeff Dunn even reported that 92% of teachers agree they would like to use more education technology in the classroom than they currently due, pointing towards the conclusion that technology helps kids learn.

We would have to compare many more studies to come to a sure conclusion, especially because there are some aspects that fall through about the studies above. One only makes conclusions about 7^th graders and one does not specify what population their participants are representative of, but their conclusions show changes in the way humans are processing information. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic from Psychologytoday.com also says “[humans’] ability to solve problems depends not on the knowledge they can store but on their capacity to connect to a place where they can retrieve the answer to find a solution.”

s this making us smarter or dumber? Some say we are smarter for having “produced a unique human intelligence” by creating resources that we can reference as “the access to raw information provided by the internet is unparalleled and democratizing”; others say our “deepening dependence” is changing the way our brains work for the worse. I agree with the Times article – to the question of whether technology is making us smarter or dumber, “The answer is ‘both,’ and the choice is up to us.” What do you think?

Read more: 

Does Technology Make Us Smarter or Dumber? | TIME.com http://ideas.time.com/2012/11/29/how-to-use-technology-to-make-you-smarter/#ixzz2mOEsPaQu

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201305/is-technology-making-us-stupid-and-smarter

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6043/776.full

http://www.bing.com/search?q=definition+of+intelligence&form=IE10TR&src=IE10TR&pc=HPNTDFJS

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19644978

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/technology-making-us-smarter-you-think/

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/15/internet-brain-neuroscience-debate

http://www.personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/SIOW_Reflections/blog/

Thinking about every bite of homemade mashed potatoes, stuffing, turkey, rolls, pie, and cake I had, I am not proud of the amount of unnecessary food I ate during break. Even though it was nice to see my family, I find myself stressed because of the 5 pounds I undoubtedly gained and the $70 less I have in my bank account after black Friday/cyber Monday. I have noticed a pattern – I feel this way after every holiday, as my self-control is nowhere to be found.

Listening to Christmas music, you would never know that wintry times of “good cheer” stress people out. Over 90% of Americans say they stress about at least one aspect of the holidays, according to survey conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center (results were based on a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,013 adults). The top three things they worry about: crowds, gaining weight, and spending money.

The holidays seem to be a hurricane of vicious cycles. We have such high expectations for the holidays that are stressful when things don’t go perfectly. We love the opportunity to eat food and celebrate with our families, but we dread the giving/getting the wrong gifts, and sometimes, when around our family and friends, emotionally eat more (and drink more alcohol) as a way to curb stress.

The holidays can trigger stress, depression, and anxiety, as well as severely affect people struggling with alcohol addiction. In the case of alcoholism, there are a lot of support articles on the internet for alcoholics to stay strong during the holidays, which leads me to believe alcoholics are more likely to drink more during holidays. As Drew Edwards from PsychCentral.com says, “Problem drinkers and alcoholics love the holidays because there are more social occasions to drink. They say they feel more “normal” because the occasional drinkers are also more likely to abuse alcohol during this time of year.” Along the same lines, there are many support articles for people dealing with anxiety, encouraging them to stay strong and use coping mechanisms to deal with their anxiety during the holidays. Jocelyn Miller, PhD, goes into more detail about the triggers and effects of holiday stress here.

At this point in science, we know there are health risks to being overweight and being stressed.  There is even a health problem called “holiday heart syndrome.” An abnormal heartbeat triggered by excessive drinking and big meals, this syndrome was named in 1978 after an observational study found it can cause heart disease.

Why do we continue to celebrate holidays every year if we find ourselves unable to control our unhealthy habits and are putting ourselves at health risks for more?

The answer: in a New York Times Article by Matt Killingsworth, he shared that after using an app to survey 20,000 people and having them report “how happy they feel at randomly selected moments during daily life, people were happiest around the holidays.” The survey asked whether people felt very good or very bad, and it asked people at random moments in an attempt to measure general contentment for the day. Killingsworth observed: “even for people who do not celebrate Christmas, [Christmas] is the “happiest” day of the year by a significant margin, Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve are not too far behind.”

As the first study only used a telephone and the second one only gathered data through a mobile app, the results limit the population representation to people with phones/smartphones. We cannot rely entirely on these studies to make a conclusion, but they give some answer to the question: are holidays bad for you? To me, I still think the benefits, like the happiness they generate, outweigh the cons of holidays. Do you think holidays are good or bad? Either way, do you think we as a society should make changes towards “healthier” holidays?

Man’s best friend: also known as Fluffy, Fido, or for me, Jake and Teddy … you love your dog, but does your dog love you back?

In “Does Your Dog Love You Back?” by Jason G. Goldman, a post I found on scientificamerican.com, Goldman summarized a study done by Swedish scientists trying to find the answer. The prediction was that dogs do love us back, and that the stronger the relationship is perceived as being by the owner, the more strongly bonded the dog also is to its owner.

The Swedish study observed 20 participants recruited by ads. The participants included 16 women and 4 men, between the ages of 17-69, and 8 female and 12 male dogs between the ages 2-8 who had been living with their owners for at least six months. The scientists asked the owners to complete the Monash Dog Owner Relationship Scale (MDORS), which “is a multi-dimensional questionnaire developed to specifically investigate the dog-owner relationship from the owner’s point of view”. Both dogs and owners participated in a version of the Strange Situation Procedure, which tests the attachment of the dog and owner (similar to the attachment of a toddler and a parent). The dogs’ body language was recorded. Variables in the dogs’ body language included “changes in exploration, passive behaviour, independent play, social play, physical contact and tail wagging,” all clues to a dog’s emotional interest/attachment. Read the full report here.

The study showed that dogs whose owners reported a lot of interaction with their dog, when in a room with their owner purposely ignoring them, were more likely to initiate physical contact/less likely to play independently. In the end, there was no correlation found between how long the dog and owner new each other, but instead a correlation in the type of play and the described strength of the relationship between dog and owner. This is why it is important to make a note of the kind of relationship owners had with their dogs because throughout the dog’s life, it may have been positively reinforced for close interaction. Even though it may be evidence of a clear relationship between dog and dog owner, the study in no way proves that the dog loves the owner just as much as they love it.

However, there are other elements that favor the prediction dogs love humans just as much as they love their dogs – genetic and neurological reasons. Dogs seem to have a symbiotic and social relationship with us, hypothesized to have stemmed from our hunting relationship with them (and before them, wolves) which is why they have herding and gathering tendencies. Dogs did not have to hunt once humans started taking them in as companions. They grew to depend on humans and enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship – the dog gets taken care of; the humans have a companion and hunting/herding help.

This quality of domestication continues in dogs genetically, as proven by a study done comparing wolf pups and dog pups human interactions after they were raised by humans since birth. Dog puppies, when put in a situation where they had to make eye contact/interact with humans to get what they want, were more likely to look to the humans for help and use them as tools than the wolf puppies, who never figured out the connection between the human and the reward.

That study supports that dogs genetically are more inclined to interact with humans. In “Biological Evidence that Dog’s Are A Man’s Best Friend,” Goldman again summarizes studies but this time summarizes ones that support the theory that there is a biological mechanism causing the mutual attachment between a dogs and humans. Dogs “tend to look longer at a picture of their owner when it is paired with a recording of their owner’s voice than with a stranger’s voice.” Dog’s also have been found to “exhibit separation anxiety” when apart from owners as a stress response in their endocrine system is activated. Another study measuring a dog’s heart rate and heart rate variability compared to when it sees its owner vs. other strangers. It found that not only can dogs distinguish who their owners are when they see them, they have an emotional response to seeing them evident by autonomic arousal. Dog’s heart rate and heart rate variability decreased as they got used to the strangers, but increased as soon as they saw their owner.  Read more here.

In another study Goldman covered, 55 dog owners were asked about the strength of relationship they had with their dogs. The experimental group had to pee in a cup, played with their dogs for a half hour, and then peed again, while the control group peed before and after ignoring their dog. The experiment results showed that dog owners who have strong relationships with their dogs have higher levels of oxytocin in their urine. Oxytocin is “the most important neurotransmitter that is responsible for social bonding

Granted, there are weaknesses in these studies as many of them do not account for variability in different types of breeds – for instance, is a breed of dog that is more similar to a wolf than another demonstrate less attachment? But, many of the studies have a big enough group of participants that dog breed varies a lot, so the results still have value.

In conclusion, there is evidence that suggests biological mechanisms which support the possibility of owners and their dogs having a mutual connection. To me, I don’t know if I need science to prove that my dog loves me back – I know we have a connection.

I found the next addition Penn State needs to make to their campus.

According to an article from gizmag.com, the British company Pro-Teq just came out with a new technology called the “Star Path” that not only looks magical, but could revolutionize how we light up our world at night.

Star Path is a ” water-resistant, spray-on coating that absorbs UV light during the day and releases it at night”. The particles are able to tell how much light they should emit based on the light around them, similar to bio luminescence.

Pro-Teq applies the star path with special spraying equipment. The begin the application with a “polyurethane base and aggregate (a rocky, sandy mixture that forms the new path-top) followed by the biolmuniscent material itself and a polyaspartic topcoat that seals the whole thing together”. What’s awesome is it doesn’t take long to apply – Pro-Teq did 1600 sq ft in 30 minutes. After that, the coating takes a little under four hours to dry, and voila, places have new pathways that look like regular pavements during the day and star paths at night.

The question to ask though is: how will this technology change our world as we know it?

The star path is an alternative to street lighting. It is very easy to apply, it harvests natural light, and glows comparable amounts to street lights but in a cheaper and more environmentally friendly way. It also has anti-slip properties and is none reflective.

Pro-Teq is testing it in Chris Piece’s park in Cambridge, but they have big plans for the star path. They have a vision for bike paths, walking paths, driveways, and eventually, as Digital Trends covered,, roadways and highways.

There is conversation about how this will work in the winter with less daylight time, but Pro-Teq is confident in their product. Their website, http://www.pro-teqsurfacing.com/, offers 11 different path colors and shows pictures of their work with star path so far.

This technology could also significantly help developing countries who don’t have a consistent power supply.

After learning about this new technology, I am most excited to see if it will catch on in the future. I think it should, especially in developing countries as an alternative to the inconsistent power. With the quick application and reusable energy benefits, I think we might see more of these paths in the future. Like Digital Trends, I too am crossing my fingers for glow-in-the-dark highways by 2014.

What do you guys think? Does this sound like a feasible technology that will catch on? Have you ever heard of something similar?

After reading Caitlin Sullivan’s blogpost about “Evil” and learning about how her friend’s friend got caught in the midst of a gang shooting and was shot three times and was paralyzed for life. 

In my last blog post, I analyzed studies that suggested sitting could be killing us. I concluded that because of the amount of studies, the amount of people in their studies, and the dramatic results, that the statistics were significant. Here is a great info graphic sharing the statistics found that show sitting can be bad for you: http://visual.ly/sitting-killing-you

These studies show that sitting excessive hours a day can increase one’s risk for heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, depression, obesity, cancer – you name it. This is still true even for people who exercise regularly. Because  our lifestyles lead us to sit so often, I think that these statistics demand our attention.

Nilofer Merchant, of the Huffington Post, is calling sitting the smoking of our generation. Sitting might even be worse for you –  “for every single hour of television watched after the age of 25, a viewer’s life expectancy is reduced by 21.8 minutes.“

“By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes.”

Yikes. Smoking, as we learned, came as close as it can get to being proven bad for you, and yet people still smoke and still pick up the habit. These statistics are showing that sitting may be just as bad for us, if not even worse, but what can we actually do to fight this?

Within our hard-working American lifestyles, there is not a lot of room for flexibility. A good amount of people have jobs that require them to work 8-9 hours a day sitting.

Nilofer Merchant faced this obstacle as well, but she thought of creative ways to incorporate more movement throughout her day to fight the odds. This included her changing her business meetings from sitting ones to walking ones, The MayoClinic offered solutions as well, such as stand, walk around while talking on the phone. I even found suggestions online about incorporated a high desk with a working treadmill underneath it.

These are all good ideas, but do I really think people will incorporate these changes into their lives enough to make a difference? No. Even after writing these blogposts, I doubt I will make any changes to my routine besides maybe getting up to throw out my trash in a trash can instead of aiming to make a basket.

Why is this? Why does it take society so long to make changes even when scientific evidence is staring them straight in the face? We know it is important for health reasons to be active, yet our culture is evolving to be more and more technologically demanded, therefore we spend more times behind a computer. People still smoke. People still hold racial prejudices. People still don’t recycle. We can identify problems, but what does it take to actually change them?

I will start to make an effort myself – maybe I will convince my thon committee members to have a group-meet up where we walk around campus instead of getting froyo. Maybe Andrew will ask us to all stand up and pace back and forth for a class. Maybe these things take a lot of little changes, and in our lifetimes we won’t be able to see the differences made by these statistics.

One thing is for sure, at least Dwight got it right.

http://vimeo.com/21800285