Me and my dad during free fall.

Growing up in a skydive family, I was always looking up. Both my parents skydived and ever since I was little I would watch each person fall through the sky and land back safely on the ground. As I got older, I started thinking more about the science involved in skydiving. Here’s
what I found out.

To start with, I looked up the probability of dying due to a skydiving accident. I know that there are a lot of people who think that going up into an airplane and then jumping out of it miles up into the air is crazy, but not as crazy as driving to the supermarket.  Discovery News did the math and found that you are 24 times more likely to die in a car crash than to die skydiving. This would be considered a relative risk, or a risk that is measured to increase the risk of something else. However, this could also be an absolute risk, the number of events per something.  In skydiving, there is estimated 3 million jumps per year, take the fatality of 21 people in 2010, and you get a .0007% chance of dying from skydiving. Basing it off a car crash again, there are about 10 million car crashes that result in 40,000 fatalities; you are looking at a .0167% chance of dying in a car crash. Just by looking at the data, it would seem that skydiving is safer than something everyone does every day.

Newton’s law of gravity says that what goes up must come down. With that being said, what does gravity do to the way we fall? Each person is different; different heights and weights. What would happen to someone who was 5’6 and weighed 150 pounds, or 6’0 and 150 pounds? The way gravity works is that your body mass affects how fast you fall through the air. The heavier you are, the faster your velocity will be, and vice versa. With the two heights and weights I mentioned above, the weight is the same, so the taller person has more surface area, making him slower than the 5’6 person.  Therefore, if you are ever skydiving and you get stuck in a rainstorm, you will be falling faster than the water because you have more surface area, meaning that your terminal velocity will be greater than the raindrops.

After freefall, there comes a certain amount of time, and altitude, that you need to pull your parachute. The parachute resists the air resistance, therefore slowing you down. It creates a large surface area with a large amount of drag.  But, does the size of a parachute affect how fast you fall?  There are a lot of at home science experiments you can do to test it yourself. But, without testing it, I’ll explain it using physics. As I explained before, the greater the surface area, the slower you will fall. There are many different types of skydiving parachutes, known as canopies. The most common are the rectangle parachutes and the circle parachute.

Circle Canopy

A study done by Emily B. Schisler tested the descent rate of the different types of canopies. Her hypothesis stated that she believed the circle canopy would fall the slowest.  She tested four shapes; circle, rectangle, square and parallelogram of equal area. This was one on a small scale, 360 centimeters to be exact. She concluded that the circle parachute had the slowest time, meaning the most air resistance, and the rectangle had the fastest descent rate. This agreed with her alternative hypothesis.

I am under rectangle canopy on my descent

When I went skydiving, I was underneath a rectangle canopy and we descended in about 15 minutes from 4,000 feet. However, there are different types of rectangle canopies, all varying in size. Some can be bigger and others smaller. It depends on the skydiver’s weight. After researching this topic a little more, I feel more comfortable knowing that there is less risk in skydiving than driving a car, and if I were to pursue a skydiving hobby, I would know what kind of parachute to get in order to end up safely on the ground.

As I sit in my dorm room with my window open, I hear all sorts of sounds. People playing games in the grass, the band’s drums from a distance away, even people in my hall. I hear this all as I try to do my homework. Every day it seems like I hear these sounds and it got me thinking about my concentration. Are these background noises affecting my work?

Research was done by Louisiana State University to test if distractions can hurt cognitive performance.  Researchers asked second grade students and college students to participate in this experiment. The participants wore headphones and were shown words on a computer screen and were to memorize them in order. Meanwhile, while they read, unrelated words were put through their headphones. It is unknown what the experiment size was to this observational study. But, the researchers concluded that the performance to multitask decreased. In the college students, their performance went down 10% while the second grade performance decreased 30%.

As I researched the topic a little more, I started to wonder what not only the sounds around us were doing, but what our phones and computer screens were doing to our performance. Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment to test how much brain power was lost when we are interrupted. 136 participants were asked to read and answer questions about a short passage. They were broken up into three groups; Control group, Interrupted group and On High Alert group. During the first test, the Interrupted and On High Alert groups were interrupted twice, while the second test the Interrupted group was the only one to be interrupted and the On High Alert group waited for an interruption that never happened. The result from the first test is that the groups answered correct 20% less often than the control group. The second test showed improvement for the Interruption group because they were able to improve how to deal with the interruptions; they now answered correctly 14%. Meanwhile, the On High Alert group did increasingly better. They increased to 43% because their brains were able to adapt. The conclusion is that it is possible to train from distractions.

To go off of the study done by Acquisti and to bring my topic full circle, a study done by the University of California asks the question if we can train our brain by using sounds to ignore distractions. By using both aged rats and humans, researchers used various frequencies as both targets and distractions. Throughout the experiment, the participants had to determine the target frequency while also hearing the distraction frequencies. At the end of the experiment, the researchers concluded that both rats and humans were able to ignore the distraction sounds and focused on the target sounds.

It would seem that we are able to train our brains to stop hearing these distractions that surround us every day. However, this could be considered a false positive. In order to be more certain, more tests will have to be done.

Souce

We’ve all been there. We take selfie after selfie until we find one we kind of like and keep that one, meanwhile discarding the rest. What we are looking for is our good side to our face. But what determines our “good side”? And why is it more attractive than the other side?

Wake Forest University psychology professor Dr. James Schirillo and his co-author, Kelsey Blackburn did an experiment that tested just that. They observed 27 male and female college students on photos of 10 males and 10 females, each photo mirrored. The researchers observed the pupils of the participant’s eyes because when you look at something pleasant, they dilate. Concluding that when the students looked at the left side of the face, their pupils were larger than when they looked at the right side. Meaning that the left side is the more attractive side of the face.

Unfortunately I could not find any more studies on this topic, which could be due to the file drawer problem. If I were to do an experiment on this, I would start out by having 15 different pictures of people (famous and not famous) from their left side and their right. I would then hold up the two different pictures side by side for 5 seconds and the participants would have to decide which face was more attractive at first glance. My null hypothesis would be that each side of the face is as equally attractive. This experiment however would have a couple of confounding variables such as if the famous person was liked by the participants, what the person was wearing, how good the vision is by the participant and how close the picture is to the person.

Girl outdoors holding two mirrors  

Source

Over the weekend, I took the 3 hour trip back home to visit my friends and family at my high school’s homecoming football game. On Sunday when I was returning back to State College, it seemed as if time was flying and I got back here so much quicker than it took to go home the first time. This got me thinking about all the other time’s I’ve traveled some place, and every time, it seems to go quicker on the way home. Why does this happen?

A study was done Ryosuke Ozawa of the Dynamic Brain Network Laboratory at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences at Osaka University that tested exactly this question. Ozawa tested 20 healthy men (aged 20-30) on 3 different movies. Movie 1 was walking from point A to B, movie 2 was walking from point B to A and the final movie was walking from C to D. Each movie was approximately the same distance and time. The experimental groups were asked to watch the videos and say when it felt like 3 minutes went by. They were also asked to  take off their watches and to not count. Half the group watched videos 1 and 2(round trip condition), the other half watched 2 and 3 (non round trip condition). At the end, the participants were asked which movie took longer. Ozawa concluded that ” our two methods of time estimation suggest that the return trip effect does not affect the timing mechanism itself, but rather our feeling of time postdictively.”

Another three studies were done by Niels van de Ven, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands also testing the return trip effect. His first study tested the return trip effect of a bus trip which was the field study. Here, 57 females said that the trip on the way home was shorter. Ven examined to see if recognizing different waypoints along the way determined the effect and concluded that recolonization has nothing to do with the passage of time. His first study did conclude that the more the participants thought that the initial trip would have taken longer, the more they felt the return trip took less time.

Ven’s second study was the field experiment that tested a bicycle trip with 93 students and an unknown route. They were randomly assigned into groups of 5-10 people and had to travel on two different routes both equaling the same time and distance. A control group went out first traveling the first route and then the second. At the end of each they estimated  how long each took, saying that they were both roughly 42 minutes. When the experimental group went out doing both at once, they  stated that the route on the way back was the shorter route. This is agreeing with the alternative hypothesis.

The third and final study is the controlled lab experiment and is similar to Ozawa’s experiment. Participants watched a video of someone bicycling from her home to someone else’s and then back home again, each equaling the same distance and time. 139 participants watched the video and were asked how long the initial and the return trip had taken. Ven concluded that the participants agreed with his hypothesis.

All three of Ven’s studies showed the effect of the return trip effect. The effect is not due to familiarity of places, but rather the expectations of the trip.

It is possible that the return trip effect is a cause chance, but it is highly unlikely. It is also possible that an unknown factor is effecting our perception of time to the distance traveled.

Photo

In class the other day, Andrew put a statistic on the board saying how 94% of college professors think they are better than the average teacher. I didn’t think anything of it until I got back to my dorm later and started wondering if that sort of thing actually happens. We all know that some people think that they are better than others, but how true can that actually be? Do cops think they are better than everyone else?

Looking at the topic in the most basic way, prisoner verses prison guard; the popular Stanford Prison Experiment studied the effects prisons have on human behavior. The null hypothesis in this situation was that prison guards didn’t treat the inmates badly. To prove this wrong, male college students volunteered and the participants were randomly placed into the role of a guard (experimental group) or a prisoner (control group). The prisoners were “arrested” and given the typical prisoner clothing, while the guards were given khakis, sunglasses and handcuffs. Within hours of becoming their new persons, guards began harassing prisoners, taunted, and given useless tasks. Eventually the guards became aggressive which lead to ending the experiment a week early. Zimbardo, the creator of the experiment, concluded that the men in the guard position changed their behavior to act as a stereotypical guard. The experiment showed how when you are around people your age, and they are in a higher position than you are, they will act like they are better and you will see them as higher, and more respectful because of what they look like.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was an observational study without confounding factors because prior to the experiment, each person was tested to ensure their mental standings. This experiment was ruled as unethical by the American Psychology Association preventing any other experiment like this to be conducted in this manor.

Unfortunately, I cannot find any other studies that test the arrogance of cops. If I were to do an experiment I would observe the behaviors of the police towards people they pull over, or encounter throughout the day. I would do this by randomly selecting people and shifts to follow, placing a camera in their cars because I feel that if my presence was there they may change their attitude towards situations, which would be a confounding variable. I would follow these people around for a couple days and mark when I thought that they were acting as if they were better than the people around them, which could lead to biased opinions. My null hypothesis would be that the police would not act arrogant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee

It’s national coffee day! And as the 44,000 students at Penn State rush to their favorite coffee shop to get their free coffee, I couldn’t help but question what coffee does to a female college student. I recently started drinking coffee because everyone always says that coffee and busy working college students go together, but is coffee actually doing to students?

An observational study done by Bae YJ, Kim MH, studied 353 female college students. Breaking them up into three groups; one non coffee, one light coffee and one moderate coffee group, they found out that the average intake of dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin B6 and the amount of vegetables were higher in the non coffee group than the light coffee group. The moderate coffee group drank more alcohol than any other group. The study concluded that females that drink more coffee have a greater intake of food and nutrients. Most of the time, they aren’t the healthy options. However, it can get difficult to determine if coffee is the only factor harming your body. Coffee drinkers also tend to smoke, drink alcohol and do little physical activity.

If we look at the nutrition facts about coffee, it seems like it shouldn’t be too bad for us. If you look at plain, black coffee or espressos, they have the least amount of calories at less than 5 per cup, and it has little to none nutrition value. However, not every college students drinks plain coffee. Starbuck’s Pumpkin Spice Latte has 310 calories per 16 fl oz. and it’s high in fats and carbs.

An observational study was done, that studied 1189 college students, both men and women that surprisingly found coffee consumption was higher in the males than females by almost 20%. This study was adequately randomized, having a slight difference in numbers and age, but had confounding variables with it. For one, not everyone likes coffee. Some people take it black, while others take it with extra sugar. If this study were to become an experiment, the scientist conducting the study would have to make sure test any kind of flavor that may go against his hypothesis.

There are some benefits to coffee. Han-Seok Seo of the Seol National University in South Korea did a study on stressed lab rats to see what the smell of coffee did to them. They found out that when the rats smelled the coffee, genes in their brains released antioxidants and reduced their stress. Other researchers found that drinking coffee could lower your risk of getting Type 2 diabetes. They found out that people who drank four or more cups of coffee a day decreased their chance 50% lower.

The science on coffee is very controversial. Some people have studies that are 100% for coffee and say that humans can benefit from it, while others are against it. If I were to do an experiment on coffee and college students, I would start my hypothesis by asking what coffee is doing to our health both mentally and physically. The control group is the group that doesn’t drink coffee and the experimental is the group that does. The experimental group would be broken up into categories; black coffee drinkers, lightly sugared coffee and highly sugar coffee. Each would drink four cups of coffee a day for a month to test how the person is feeling and if coffee benefited their health in anyway.

As I was watching TV the other night, a commercial for Huggies Little Movers Diapers came on.  It shows a baby being swaddles and eventually getting up and crawling around. I know that swaddling babies is just something that you do to protect the baby. But is swaddling a baby safe?

 I do not have a baby, nor have I ever swaddled one, but it seems like keeping a newborn baby swaddled is a good thing. For those of you who don’t know what swaddling is, it’s when the baby is cocooned up into a blanket so that they can’t force their way out.  It is used to keep the baby relaxed, warm and safe from its new reflexes. Babies move their arms a lot, so swaddling keeps the arms tight to reduce the probability that they will hurt themselves.

 Swaddling is mainly done to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which is the unexpected death of an infant. There is no definite cause to SIDS, nor is there a way to treat it. To reduce the probability of a child dying of SIDS, it is best to have the baby sleep on its back. Swaddling the baby helps keep it in place, so that the baby won’t move around and ends up on its stomach, and from grabbing anything that may harm it while sleeping. If the baby rolls over when sleeping, it’s more likely to “over-heat, have pauses in breathing, and re-breathe the air previously exhaled”.

Swaddling may be one of the better things for an infant, but there are some risks that go along with it. Babies can be swaddled too tightly and develop hip problems, respiratory infections, over heating and suffocation if the swaddle becomes too lose.

My opinion would be to keep swaddling babies. I believe that the pros out weigh the cons and keeping your baby safe from SIDS and from itself is the best thing for the infant. A mother should properly learn how to swaddle to reduce the risks. But swaddling is here to stay.

 As I was sitting in class one day, the palm of my hand resting on my cheek, I began to look around at the people surrounding me. A lot of people were doing exactly what I was. I began to wonder what kind of bacteria was on my hands and if it was dangerous to my skin. What does touching my face actually do to my health?

 We are all guilty of touching our faces. We itch, pick, and touch our faces constantly.  The average person can touch their face up to 3000 times a day.  But between touching our faces, we are also touching everything else, including doorknobs, desks, cellphones, and each other, which carries bacteria. The bacteria, dirt, and oils get onto our hands and eventually makes it way to our faces. The pores trap the objects and can make acne, blackheads, and whiteheads worse.  However, if you stop touching your face, you may see a reduction on how much acne you get. You can also exfoliate to reduce the size of your pores, getting the disgusting bacteria out.

 Touching your face can lead to something more serious than acne: illness. Touching your nose or mouth can spread any kind of bacterial infection, like a cold or the flu.  And sometimes can’t be stopped with just washing your hands because any object that a sick person touched can be coated with the sick bacteria and if you touch it then touch your face, its more likely that you will get sick. If you scratch your face, you are allowing the bacteria to get under your skin to cause infection.  But you can also be the cause of an infection; if you are sick, you can transmit the disease the same way you can pick it up.

 There are ways to prevent getting more acne or getting sick and that is to stop touching your face. This is extremely difficult to do because it’s become somewhat of a habit. Ways to decrease it easily are to be aware of your hands and where they are, and to wash your hands frequently. The CDC says that the best way to wash your hands is to lather your hands with soap for 20 seconds paying attention to under your nails, and between your fingers. Touching our faces constantly isn’t something that we should continue doing, and if we do, it can lead to some unpleasant consequences.

 If you’re anything like me, every time you take a shower you wash your hair. But as you lather your hair for the fifth time that week, do you ever wonder what exactly the shampoo is doing to your hair? How many times do you actually need to shampoo and if you over shampoo, what are the consequences?

Shampoo is humanities way to washing our hair. It contains Cocamidopropyl Betaine, which is a foaming agent, Sodium Chloride, salt to thicken the shampoo, and Citric Acid, to lower the pH balance. Each one of these cause no harm to your body and are there for product purposes. However, with the good comes the bad. Shampoos also contains Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, which is a chemical that strips natural oils and protein from your hair, Formaldehyde, which could potentially cause hair loss, and Synthetic Fragrance or Parfum, that can cause irritation to the scalp. With all of this in mind, how much shampooing should you be doing?

WebMD says that only a “small group of people need to shampoo daily, those who exercise a lot, with fine hair or living in a humid place.”  So if you think about it, you don’t need to wash your hair everyday. We have oils on our scalp that keep our hair healthy and the more we wash with shampoo, the less oils we have. That means we must only need to shampoo every couple days. Dermatologist Paradi Mirmirani says that the answer is different for everyone and it depends on your skin type, hair texture, and styling.  Your circumstance will determine how often you need to wash your hair.

The extreme consequences of shampooing could be hair loss, hair thinning and scalp damage. But normally, if you over wash your hair, it could lead to dryness and striping natural oils. I think that we as humans are into this idea of shampooing everyday to make ourselves clean. But naturally that is not the case. Shampooing every couple days is the safe way to go.

I love kettlebell workouts. I love everything about them. I love how much fun it is to throw around a “bowling ball with a handle” and how completing a workout makes me feel. Not many people know what kettlebell is, but essentially, it’s a weight that you can do swings, or AB circuits with. My mom and I got our first kettlebell DVD a couple Christmases ago. We got the Kettlebell Kickboxing Scorcher Series created by Dasha Libin Anderson  The DVD claims to “burn 400-600 calories in under 35 minutes”. But, are kettlebell workouts a good and healthy workout choice?

Kettlebells date back to Ancient Greece and eventually made their way to Russia in the 18^th century. Since then, it has been apart of the Russian culture and a way to develop strength. They made their way to North America late in the 20^th century.  Recently they became popular with the military. Kettlebells can range from 5 lbs to 80 lbs, and you want to use only what you can handle.  But what makes them stay around for centuries? For one, they are portable.  You don’t need extensive workout machines to use a kettlebell. You pick one up and you’re ready to swing wherever you are. They are fun and relatively affordable.

Kettlebell uses a lot of muscles during the workout. When you swing, you use full body motions bringing together the core, legs and arms. The university of Southern Denmark did a study and found that when doing a kettlebell swing, your lower back and buttocks experience high-level activity.  This leads to positive outcomes. Your back gets stronger, meaning less back pain, and you become in sync with your breathing, which makes it safer to breath and exercise.

The research group of Chad Schnetter, John Porcari, Carl Foster and Mark Anders set up an experiment to test the benefits of kettlebell workouts. They took a group of people and had them do different kettlebell workouts for 20 minutes. They concluded that within those 20 minutes, they burned on average 272 calories; each member responding positively about the kettle bell workout.  Another study was done similar to Chad and his group’s and they concluded that “kettlebell training could be a useful addition to strength and conditioning programs that aim to develop the ability to rapidly apply force,” and that “Kettlebells appear to be suboptimal for increasing aerobic power and maximal strength.”

The only negative effects that come with kettlebell workouts are the same that come with any workout; fatigue, back pain, and injury. But that’s the risk you take when you pick up weights. For me, kettlebell is a way to build up my strength and stamina. It allows me to be healthy and powerful in a short amount of time. During my experience with kettlebell, I became stronger in a short amount of time and built up endurance as well. I think that the research backs me up when I say that kettlebell is one of the best methods of working out and getting healthy.

Ever since high school, everyone tells you to always look your best for job interviews; arrive early, dress for the job you want not the job you have, and to be clean. I hopefully will never have that problem, but what would happen if I was walking to the interview and it starts to rain? The impression I am giving out would be that I am not prepared because I forgot my umbrella. But will this little thing make or break my career?

Every first impression comes with smaller impressions. We can break them down into two categories:facial expression and attire.

Jane Willis and Alexander Todorov experimented and revealed it take a tenth of a second to make an impression on a stranger based on their facial features. “Matured faces” are more likely to be taken seriously than “baby faces”. We use our past experiences to judge what the face looks like and try to determine what kind of value the person has to our social lives. But by judging our first impression by how their face is, we are looking at the emotions it holds and what kind of stereotypes it may have. We unknowingly rate faces on competence, dominance, likability and trustworthiness. Humans look at each other’s face but it can not be the only thing we base impressions on, it is only a part of a whole thing.

Once you get past that the person’s face looks like, you start to check them out. Their clothes can say a lot about what kind of person they are. Dr. Jennifer Baumgartner, a clinical psychologist and author of “You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You” says that there is no one piece of clothing that makes someone look successful or unsuccessful, but rather how they wear the object decides for them. “The worst clothing is.. that kind that shows you didn’t pay attention to you body/age/situation..” Normally, if you go to an interview wearing a suit or neutral colored clothing, you will give off the impression that you are polished, ready to succeed and able to look presentable of that company. If someone comes in wearing anything you would wear to the club, that person may not be taken seriously.

There are, however, miscellaneous factors that go in to first impressions such as visible tattoos, piercings and if you are sexually attractive to the person or not.

With all of this in mine, can first impressions make or break a career? At job interviews, you only have about 6 minutes to convince the employer to hire you. I would say that within those 6 minutes, you would need to do everything mostly correct to be considered for the job. First impressions stick with you, whether or not you believe them anymore. If you didn’t like someone the first time you saw them, then it’ s likely you may never like them even if they seem like a decent person. First impressions are extremely important, and they shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Hey everyone! I am Anastasia Skold. I usually go by Annie and I’m a freshman from the Scranton Pennsylvania area. I am in the college of Communications majoring in Telecommunications.

I took this class because I heard good things about it from my advisers so i decided to give it a shot. I am not a science major because it isn’t my passion. My passion is creating videos and the news. A video that gave me the inspiration to create stop motion videos is this one.

A quick thing about me is that over the summer i went skydiving, so here is a picture of me and my dad in the air.