Author Archives: Mackenzie Elizabeth Kirsch

How Do Taste Buds Really Work?

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I’ve been a picky eater all my life. When I was a kid, my mom would have to make me a separate dinner on certain nights because I refused to eat what she was making for the rest of my family. I was an extremely annoying kid. Thankfully as I have gotten older, I have been willing to try more exotic foods and I can say that my mom no longer has to make me a different meal from my family. However, I would always get mad when my family would get frustrated with me if I didn’t like a particular food. It was once thing if I just refused to try it, but if I didn’t like it, you can only blame that on my taste buds right?

For a simple overview of tastebuds, there are around 10,000 of them and each of them picks up sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami tastes. Although taste buds allow us to enjoy all the savory, rich flavors there are in foods, their main purpose is to protect us against poisonous food we could potentially eat on accident. So it seems like taste buds do all the work when it comes to eating and tasting certain flavors, however there is another component that is equally important.
Smell plays a huge role when someone is eating food. We’ve all heard of the trick of plugging your nose when you have to eat something you don’t like and this is why that is a good recommendation. As this article states, we may think a particular food tastes like another food, but our taste buds only recognize 5 specific tastes so our sense of smell had to effect our perception of taste. If you’re interested on some theories as to why men and women crave different foods or how texture and culture effect what foods we like, I suggest reading that second article, it’s pretty interesting and you can see what theories hold true for you.
So how do scientists know smell effects taste? At the end of the second article, people in a newsroom tried three different flavors of jelly beans: black licorice, banana, and cappuccino. Each person closed their eyes and plugged their nose and as they ate a jelly bean they had to guess what flavor they were eating. On average only 33% of the people guessed right. I think that definitely says something about how smell effects your taste considering how different all three of those flavors are. However, this study was not very professionally done. Yes, it was already a pretty sure thing that smell effected taste, but if you were to just go off this one test, it’s not too reliable. They only used people in the newsroom and chances are that wasn’t too many people. So not only is the study small, but it doesn’t give a good variety of people. 
With that being said, it’s pretty clear that taste buds don’t act on their own when dealing with taste and flavors of foods. So for those of you who are like me who are pretty picky when it comes to food, you can explain this to the people who make fun of you and maybe they’ll lighten up with the jokes.
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Photo courtesy of http://www.deltadentalarblog.com

Snap, Crackle, Pop

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If you read the title of this blog and instantly thought about Rice Krispies, I’m sorry to disappoint you that this post will not be about Rice Krispies or any other food. Those sounds can also refer to something else, something that is probably not as appealing. That something is knuckle cracking. I’ve fallen victim to this awful habit for quite a few years now and I don’t plan on trying to break it any time soon. All throughout my life I’ve been told knuckle cracking is bad and when I get older my knuckles are going to pay the consequences. Interested to see if that was actually true, I decided to do some research.

In a very brief article, it explains the anatomy of what your knuckle is really made up of. To simplify the article, when a person cracks their knuckles, they are essentially popping a gas bubble that has been formed in your knuckle. When that bubble is popped, it gives off that snap, crackle or pop sound. As this article states, knuckling cracking shouldn’t cause arthritis or long term damage, unless you continue to stretch out the ligaments. But where’s the proof?
In a more detailed article, it discusses a few studies that have been done to help prove the viewpoint that cracking your knuckles doesn’t cause serious damage. To view and analyze the studies better, click on the links in the article. Overall, the studies that were done touched on a wide variety of knuckle cracking. Between frequency, large sample sizes and doing studies over different time periods, it seems that there is strong evidence that cracking your knuckles really isn’t that bad.
The second article brings up a great point with one of the studies that showed negative effects from knuckle cracking. Although people’s hands were more swollen, the study doesn’t account for the condition people’s hands were in before the study started. It also had an older age group of people and we all know that in most cases the older you get the worse your joints are going to feel. There have been a number of studies done in different fashion with different outcomes, yet they all seem to lead to one conclusion: cracking your knuckles is not as bad as everyone says it is. However, everyones joints are different and everyone cracks their knuckles differently and at a different frequency. It’d be impossible to fully rule out the chance of getting arthritis from cracking your knuckles, but for those of you who also deal with this habit, don’t stress so much if it seems like you just can’t stop that snap, crackle or pop. 
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Photo courtesy of www.directlyfitness.com

Distance Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

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We’ve all heard the saying distance makes the heart grow fonder. Since we’re all in college and most of us are far away from our home, I’m sure many of you have experienced what that saying truly means in more ways than one. Whether it be your parents, your siblings, your best friend since you were five, or more specifically your boyfriend or girlfriend, going away to college and saying goodbye to those people definitely puts a strain on that relationship right? Logically we would say of course those miles apart from the people we love makes the relationship tougher, but recent studies go against what you would normally think.

According to a CNN article researchers conducted a study of 63 relationships that were in long-distance and not long-distance. They compared the amount they spoke to each other, whether it be texting, phone call, Skype or whatever other crazy way you can communicate with technology these days. When looking at the frequency, people in long-distane relationships communicated with each other more than people who lived close by. Not only that, but the long-distance participants said they “forged stronger bonds” and “felt more intimate.” You can read more here for more details on the study.
At first it seems hard to believe that distance in a relationship would actually help rather than hinder the quality of the relationship, but the more you think about it the more sense it seems to make. It goes along with the saying you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. We learn to appreciate how great our relationship is when we don’t get to see our significant other as often as we would like. 
Despite the logical reasoning behind the study’s results, there are some things that make this study more difficult to believe. For starters, couples reported themselves how they felt about their relationship. With researchers taking their data, they could have felt pressure to respond a certain way, creating bias. Also, the sample size consists of only 63 couples. In the large scheme of life, there are obviously many more couples than that in the world. With the small sample size, it doesn’t do the best job of capturing couples of all different ages, backgrounds, and sexual preference. Whether you want to believe the study or not, it is a little comforting knowing that maybe distance isn’t that bad after all. 
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Photo courtesy of http://gigaom.com

DNA Testing Only Progresses

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For those of you who were in class on Thursday, we got a close up look at Andrew’s genes. Between looking at his IQ genes and how high a risk he had for particular diseases, it was pretty clear that the genome tests can provide a lot of information on a person. And for anyone who was like me, you probably thought how more detailed could a genome test get? Well if you were doubtful that it could tell you more than it already can, science is about to prove you wrong. In an article from Science Daily, with help of molecular biology, scientist will actually be able to tell which genes you got from you mom and which genes you got from your dad. At first thought you may not think this will have a drastic change. However looking deeper into it, this could potentially have a huge impact over disease prevention, risk of a disease, and a person’s ancestry. 

This new technique that Bing Ren, a scientist at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine initiated, is called HaploSeq. As the article discusses, each chromosomes has two sets, one from the mother and one from the father. With the help of this new advancement, being able to decipher which chromosome comes from who will help scientists seen possible mutations that creates cancer and could become more proactive in treating and preventing cancer. 
Another astounding improvement from this new technique is the ability to better match organ donors to the recipients of those donors. Obviously when going through an organ transplant, there are many aspects where the new organ has to match the patient receiving the organ. HaploSeq would provide a more accurate depiction of DNA in organs, which would in return lower the risk of potential problems with an organ transplant. 
We’ve all heard about how technology can allow you to pick your child to have certain traits, and now you’ll almost be able to have a database of all DNA of people. Technology is only continue to progress at this rapid rate and as far as I am concerned, I don’t know if I would want to know all about my DNA. People always ask if you were able to know the day you were going to die would you want to know? My answer is always no, and same goes for knowing if I were to be diagnosed with cancer or Alzheimer’s. Although the people conducting this new technique believe they would have more DNA information from more people, there are also a lot of people out there like me who wouldn’t want to know a lot of the stuff they’re investigating. How do you think this technique is going to pan out? Would you want to know all about your DNA? What if in the future the only way you could receive a life saving organ transplant was to go through this entire DNA testing process? Screen Shot 2013-11-04 at 3.54.43 PM.png
Photo courtesy of www.astrochem.com

The Curse of the Hiccups

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“Just hold your breath!” “No let me scare them out of you!” “Drink water upside down!” “Stop eating so fast!”

For those of you who suffer from getting the hiccups a little more often than you would want, those sayings sound all too familiar. As someone who eats way too fast for anyone’s own good, it’s strange for me to go a day without getting those dreaded hiccups. Sometimes I’m lucky and they go away within a minute, other times, I try every single trick in the book and yet I still find myself helplessly convulsing and making those weird hiccup sounds. So why does our body put us through this torturing, annoying sensation? 
Since I am no hiccup expert or specialist, when it comes to what hiccups actually are this article says it best, “There are over 100 causes for hiccups, but the most common is irritation of the stomach or the oesophagus – the food tube that leads to it. The “hic” noise comes when the breath is cut off by the snapping shut of your glottis – which is like a fleshy lid or trapdoor that separates the food and air tubes in your throat.” There are a lot of technical terms in that description, but basically a hiccup is a disruption in our breathing process.
Eating or drinking at irregular pace is probably one of the most common ways to get hiccups, but have you ever heard of getting them from certain emotions or even a drastic change in temperature? According to another article, both of those things can be responsible for a person getting hiccups. How do we know this? That’s a great question that I couldn’t seem to find any good scientific evidence on. 
Probably one of the most scary things when getting the hiccups is if you’ll ever get rid of them. We all hear horror stories of people being stuck with hiccups for months, even years. One man, Charles Osborne, had hiccups for 68 years! Obviously this is a very rare case, but there are different levels of hiccups people can suffer from. The five groups they can be classified into are: common, persistent, acute, intractable and diabolic. It has been recommended that if you have the hiccups for more than 48 you should go to the doctors ASAP because they could be the cause of a more serious health issue. 
So that’s hiccups in a little bit more detail, but do you think there has ever been a purpose for them? Scientists have debated that in the past hiccups helped animals swallow large food. Do you have any reasons as to why hiccups come about? Do you have any special remedy that always helps you get rid of hiccups? If it were possible to test if hiccups help or hinder our bodies, how do you think we could go about that? To me, it seems like hiccups will forever be one of those annoying things that we just can’t seem to do anything about. 
Photo courtesy of http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com
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Autism: How Does It Really Develop?

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I don’t know about any of you, but I was fascinated after hearing Andrew speak about people thinking they cured their child of autism. Think about it, all of our lives we’ve thought this disease was incurable; yet there are parents who have no medical history claiming they’ve done the impossible. So, since I couldn’t seem to understand how parents could believe such a thing, I decided to do some more research on it. In an article I found, it focuses around one family who believes they’ve rehabilitated their son from autism. Notice the key word “rehabilitated.” This family understands that autism can’t be cured, and they believe that if a parent was to think their child was cured, then they never really had autism in the first place. So right off the bat, it seems this family is a little more legitimate than the examples we talked about in class. The family paid for a program called Applied Behavior Analysis or ABA. This program helps teach the kids how to learn and how behave in a positive manner. The program uses rewards and repetition to help the kids learn. Through this, the family believes their son improved greatly.

Not only did they use ABA, but they also had their son tested for levels of mercury.  As we had also discussed in class, mercury in vaccines were found to potentially cause autism. Jamie, the son in the article, had six times the amount of mercury in his body. The doctors gave him medicine to reduce the mercury levels, and Jamie’s parents claim it made a huge difference. This story kinda reminded me of the girl in the video we watched in class who suffered from a neuro disease after a flu shot. Definitely a powerful story, but I’m not entirely sure how realistic it is. So despite the fact that this family knows they can’t cure autism, their story still isn’t completely reliable.

I’m one of those people who will only believe it once I see it, so I tried to look up some more on whether or not mercury caused autism. I came across a study found on Forbes. They took an island around Madagascar and studied the women there for years. They chose this area because it has a much larger fish intake than most of the world, and fish contains mercury. Like all studies, there are confounding variables and other circumstances, but what the study found was that there is no negative developmental effects despite the huge mercury levels. This is just one study, done in one area of the world, on one large group of pregnant women, but I already am more convinced by this than the stories we heard in class or by Jamie’s story. It’s definitely a topic that will always be highly discussed, but do you believe the power of anecdotes, or do you need science to be there to back up your beliefs?

Photo courtesy of http://www.topnews.in

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Peer Pressure In A Different Light

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Peer pressure is a common topic that we hear about basically on a regular basis. Since grade school, teachers and parents have engraved it into our minds that we should never be pressured into doing something we don’t want to do. However, have you ever thought about peer pressure in the opposite way, where we are feeling the pressure to NOT do something, even if that means putting our life in danger?

In a study conducted by scientists, they had three different groups be placed into a waiting room at separate times and while those people were waiting, smoke would start to come out of a vent and fill the room. Group number one consisted of only one person in the room, group two had three people in the room but two of the people knew about the study and were told to act like they didn’t notice the smoke, and the final group had three people who did not know about the study at all. The conclusion that the study found that in group number two, where only one person wasn’t clued in on the study, only 10% of those people not knowing about the study reported the smoke. 10%! Think about that, you are in a room filling with smoke, your first thought would be there is a fire in the building and I need to get out as soon as possible. Yet, only 10% of people felt the need to report the smoke. At first thought you would think this is ridiculous, but then I started thinking and if no one else in the room said anything about the smoke, would I be the one to be different and report the smoke? What would you do in the situation?
Now, there is no doubt that this study is interesting and somewhat alarming, but how reliable are these numbers? If you check out the actual article where I found this study, there are really no details on who was used in the study and the people who were conducting the study. The people who ran it were referred to as “scientists” with no other background information. Also, it was not said how they determined who would be in the study, what age they were or what gender they were. On top of all that, it doesn’t even mention how many times they tested out these three groups. In another study that talks more about how the brain works when it comes to peer pressure, very briefly and vaguely talks about how the study was done. To me, science is hard enough to believe sometimes, so how can I believe these findings when I don’t even know the background? How would you conduct the study if you were studying peer pressure? Do you think these studies provide enough information to be believable?

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Photo courtesy of http://ethiorthodoxyouth.wordpress.com

How Do Some People Never Gain Weight?

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Have you ever been walking downtown or around campus and saw someone who seems to have the perfect body. No fat, just toned muscles. If you see someone like this and say you aren’t at least the tiniest bit jealous of them then you’re probably lying. We all strive for our definition of “the perfect body” and whether we achieve that by exercising, eating healthy, or doing both depends on that person. However, have you ever met someone who has the perfect body and just eats and eats without exercising regularly? If you have met someone like that, it’s safe to say you you despise them a little bit. Not in a malicious way, just simply hating them for the fact that they were blessed with a perfect body. So, why and how did some people get so lucky? 

As some of you could have guessed, your genes play a very large role in your average weight. According to Professor Michael Cowley who works at a university in Australia, 60 to 70 percent of our weight is based from our genes. If you ask me, that’s a pretty significant number. Although a majority of the types of genes that are involved in weight are still unknown to scientists, it is thought that this problem goes way back to our ancestors. In the past, there haven’t been problems with too much food. As our society continues to advance and more and more food is easier to access, our genes haven’t had time to catch up. So basically, our genes are still used to having less food and trying to store energy, while our body continues to consume what is considered a normal amount of food in today’s world. Professor Cowley also talks about high kilojoule foods. Kilojoule’s are just a way of measuring how much energy food has in it. As our society continues to evolve, we are being exposed to more and more of these foods which is good, but some people aren’t as lucky and still have genes that aren’t evolving as fast. 
According to another article, something known as set point plays a big factor. Our bodies naturally have a metabolic rate, which is how many calories it takes to do everyday activities. Logically, if you eat more calories than you’re body needs, that rate will go up so our bodies can try to maintain an average weight. If you’re one of those people I mentioned above that just doesn’t seem to ever gain weight, then your body burns off those extra calories when you eat more than you need. This article also goes into talking more about genes playing a factor.
So there is definitely some evidence that weight gain isn’t 100% in your control, yet eating right and exercising regularly is still important. Do you ever think genes won’t play a factor in weight? If they stop playing a factor, how do you think that would happen? Can you think of any other reasons as to why some people seem to never gain weight? 

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Photo courtesy of livestrong.com

Don’t Judge A Book By It’s Cover….If That’s Possible At Least

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We’ve been told since we were little kids: don’t judge a book by it’s cover. And as we all know, that saying goes beyond picking a book out at the library. Whether you want to admit it or not, chances are you have judged someone on their appearances. The way they dress, the things they like, the color of their skin, or who they hang out with are all things we can notice at first glance. However, most of the times there is more than what meets the eye. Why do we do this to ourselves? We automatically group people together based on what we see on the outside and to some people, what’s on the outside is all that matters. But, is that their fault? 

I’ve often wondered if there is a was a way to stop yourself from judging people, and according to this article it seems as though we aren’t even the ones responsible for our own judging. I know what you’re thinking, how are my judgmental thoughts about people not my fault? It’s definitely a confusing thought and takes some time to comprehend, but I’ll do my best to summarize what the article says. Basically the brain is one big machine and one of it’s main functions is to put preferences on things. The brain constantly wants to find a better way of doing something, or “expansion” as the article calls it. Since the brain naturally wants to put a preference on something over another thing, your best chance of preventing judging is by just letting the brain do what it’s meant to do. As the article says, “Let the mind move the way it wants to move. The natural expression of the mind is never a problem. All problems arise when “you” judge the mind, when you try to suppress the mind or take your mind personally. It’s a “human” mind, it’s not you, it’s not personal. Let the mind be, don’t identify with it.” If any of what I just said interested you at all, I would highly recommend reading the rest of the article I posted above, it’s an extremely interesting viewpoint that is thought provoking.

Now, all that I just said is according to one article. And that one article didn’t have any scientific proof or tests to back up the authors theory. So whether you want to believe it or not is completely up to you. I did find another article that touched on the same topic. The main point that this article tries to get across is that with enough repetition, you will be able to train your mind to do or not to do something. The example from the article talks about judging people, “ If you were told each day that you should not judge a book by its cover then you will grow up as an adult who never judges people by appearance.” The article laters talks about how media has influenced our judgmental ways, but thats a topic for a different day. So what do you think? Do you think you can actual train your mind with enough repetition, and if so how much repetition is needed? Do you think you and your mind are two different “entities” per say and you really shouldn’t feel responsible for judging people? I think after doing some of my research I’ve only gotten more confused with this topic, any groundbreaking ideas…anyone, anyone?

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Photo courtesy of http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk

Why Am I Feeling Sick?

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I was driving towards Pittsburgh with my family to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins just this past weekend. It’s about a two to three hour drive so I wanted to try to get some work done and be productive with my time. About ten minutes into the drive I started to get a headache and feel nausea. This isn’t the first time this has happened to me, and every time I get so frustrated. I see my dad in the front seat reading the newspaper the whole trip and not being affected at all. So why and how did I get the unfortunate genes of not being able to do any work at all in the car? It’s called motion sickness, which I’m sure many of you have heard of. As I started doing my research on the topic, I came across an article discussing experiments scienctists are doing to understand why motion sickness happens. In short, the researchers put their subjects in a room that simulated swaying back and forth. They put sensors on the subject’s head to examine how “wobbly” their body movements were after they experienced the swaying. Some researchers debate this test because it’s testing how people get that wobbly feeling and then the get sick. That goes against what you would think would make more sense, which would be people get sick and then you experience that wobbly feeling. Which order of feelings do you think makes more sense?Screen Shot 2013-09-29 at 11.36.31 AM.png

There are, of course, other theories behind why someone could suffer from motion sickness. Perceptual differences has been tested to see its role in people how suffer from motion sickness. Dr. Stoffregen has done experiments with this, and his results show that movement plays a bigger role than perceptual differences. After putting his subjects through motion sickness tests, he saw that the people who suffered from it tended to move more often. Even when they were strapped to a stretcher, they still managed to wiggle their body. However, no where in the article does it mention that the subjects were randomly selected. It doesn’t discuss age or gender either. One could assume that the subjects were randomly chosen but you really don’t know for sure. So, my question for you is, would you believe Dr. Stoffregen’s results?
If you prefer watching video rather than reading, click here to learn more about the idea that perceptual differences causes motion sickness. After watching this video, I find it pretty convincing that perceptual differences is the reason behind motion sickness, but what do you think? What other tests do you think could be done to either prove or disprove one of these theories?
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