For as long as I can remember, I have been told on Thanksgiving to blame my post-dinner sleepiness on the turkey. But after watching a Mythbuster’s episode testing the theory that turkey makes you sleepy and busting it, I learned why it wasn’t true.

Ever since I started school at Penn State, I have been flying lots of planes back and forth across the country. I love sitting by the window to watch the changing skies and landscapes, but also to watch the flaps on the wings. I have never taken physics so I didn’t fully understand how lift and all that worked so I did some research and what I found out was very interesting.

The website HowStuffWorks clarifies that flight can be explained using fluid mechanics. Gases are classified as fluids along with liquids and considering their movement, it makes a lot of sense. What makes flight possible is the relationship between four factors: lift, weight, drag, and thrust.Obviously, the force of lift and thrust have to be stronger than that of weight and drag in order to get forward and upward movement. I learned that lift is possible only when the fluid is moving around a stationary object (like a kite) or when the object is moving through a stationary fluid (like a plane through air). When air is split over and under the wing, the air above it is faster , creating lower pressure than below and this is what causes the aircraft to gain altitude. In order to turn, the pilot alters the angle of the wings using flaps to dive down on one side, while going up on the other in order to roll into the turn.

You know that feeling. Shaky hands, weak knees, and butterflies not only in your stomach, but somehow fluttering madly throughout your entire body. You can’t stop thinking about them. “Events occurring in the brain when we are in love have similarities with mental illness.”(BBC) I think that’s pretty believable. Why does this happen? Why that one person out of everyone? Helen Fisher of Rutgers University says that we fall in love in three stages and that different set of chemicals in the brain is responsible for each one.

Invasive species are a problem all over the world. Foreign species being introduced to different regions is usually at the fault of humans, intentional or not. Sometimes human ships get stowaways like rats or fleas or even viruses that will be transferred to the other region. This can be extremely dangerous and detrimental for the indigenous species. Without any natural predators, the invasive species may spread unchecked, taking over territory. Here is a frightening list of 10 of the World’s Worst Invasive Species. I think the snakehead fish that can walk on land is particularly terrifying.

So I take a break from writing blog posts to take a little nap. No big deal, right? Apparently it is because this darn cough that is leftover from a cold I had a week ago got much much worse once I lay down. So instead of sleeping, I looked up why I cough more while laying down and wrote a blog post about it…

We all know that the moon is responsible for the changing of the tides, but how exactly does it work? The moon’s gravity causes the oceans on Earth to bulge outwards causing high tides. The same thing happens to the water on the opposite side of the planet due to the centrifugal force caused by the Earth and moon revolving around a common gravitational center. The same forces are in effect when it comes to the Sun, however it is weaker due to the greater distance between the Earth and the Sun. 

I am a photojournalism major and one of the very first things that we learned in my photojournalism class was how the camera works. I think it is fascinating how that little machine in your hands is designed like the human eye. Obviously it does not do a lot of the things that a real eyeball is capable of, but it is so adjustable that you can create a wide array of effects.

Kissing: something we all enjoy. But how did it start? Did two people just decide to bump faces one day? Why do we do it? This article says that kissing may have originated from mothers feeding pre-chewed food to their infants from mouth to mouth. Obviously it has come a long way since then. Nowadays we use kissing as a way to gauge a partner for potential as a mate and perhaps even a way to maintain a relationship.

One of the first topics that this and other articles cover is how men and women view kissing differently. Women see kissing as essential and as a means to assess mates and to monitor the status of a relationship. Most men, on the other hand, see kissing as just a means to an end. They kiss with the hope of getting some more later on.

I know we discussed briefly in class how chocolate makes you smarter, but that’s not the only benefit that chocolate has for you! The biggest factor that improves health is the flavonoids. These can help prevent stokes, protect skin against UV rays, and improve mental math skills. Chocolate can also slows blood clotting and improves blood flow which reduces likelihood of a heart attack and protects against blood inflammation.