As finals quickly approach, most of us students are cramming as much in as we possibly can.  This made me contemplate how I could possibly increase the effectiveness of my studying.  I know that I have seen many students around campus listening to music while they study, but that never worked very well for me.  First I questioned if I was listening to the wrong kind of music, but then I questioned if maybe I was doing it right by not listening to music as I study.  I decided to use science to determine the answer to whether music should help or hurt a person’s study time.

Taken from spinedu.com

Surprisingly, it was rather hard to find the answer to this question.  I found many different articles online that contained largely opinions, and they were either for it or against it.  It was actually fairly hard to find scientific articles that were based on real studies.  When I eventually did find some scientific articles, it was still just as hard to find a clear answer because most articles were strongly for or against it.

One study put people into 3 groups and assigned each group a level of background music while they worked on an attention test: one group got no music as a control group, another group got music only 10 minutes before they worked on the test, and the third group listened to music for 10 minutes as they were working on the test.  The study found that listening to music 10 minutes prior to working actually made people more productive than if they had not listened at all (Shih).  However, there was extreme variation when it came to the group who listened to music while they took the test.  Another study from the University of Wales studied students’ abilities to complete a serial-recall test while they were placed in 5 different scenarios:

1. A quiet environment

2. With “steady state” speech. This means a single word (in this case, “three”) was repeated for the duration of the test

3. With “changing state” speech. This means a variety of words (in this case, random digits from 1-9) were played during the test

4. With “liked” music, meaning a song of the student’s choice (such as Lady Gaga, Rihanna, or Arcade Fire). Students brought in their own music, the only requirement was that it had to have vocals

5. With “disliked” music, which in this case was a metal song called “Thrashers” by Death Angel (all students in the study disliked metal) (Sheela Doraiswamy, 2012)

This study found that it didn’t matter whether a person liked the music that they were listening or not.  The students were equally distracted by both music that was liked and music that was not liked.  The study also found that students in a quiet environment and in a steady state speech environment performed significantly better than students in the other three environments (Perham).  However, I believe that the most surprising conclusion of the study was that student performed just as poorly while listening to music as they did listening to changing state speech (which was hypothesized to be the most distracting before the study).  Upon looking further I found a huge problem with this study; it only had 25 participants. Therefore, it was not a large enough sample to really prove much through the results.  A third study that I found from the University of Dayton concluded that having Mozart being played as background music actually improved spatial and linguistic processing abilities (Angel).  This study shows that classical music may be beneficial as background music.

Taken from glapa.info

So, what can we conclude from all of this?  Is it beneficial to listen to music while studying?  The answer to that question really depends on the type of music that is being played and the person who is trying to study.  There are huge variations, from person to person, in the effects of listening to music while studying.

Works Cited

Angel, Leslie A., Donald J. Polzella, and Greg C. Elvers. “BACKGROUND MUSIC AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE.” Ammons Scientific. University of Dayton, 1 June 2014. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Doraiswamy, Sheela. “Does Music Help You Study? – Mind the Science Gap.” Mind the Science Gap RSS. WordPress, 08 Oct. 2012. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Perham, Nick. “Can Preference for Background Music Mediate the Irrelevant Sound Effect?” Wiley Online Library. John Wiley & Sons, 20 July 2010. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Shih, Yi-Nuo. “Correlation between Work Concentration Level and Background Music: A Pilot Study.” IOS Press Content Library. N.p., 2009. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Have you ever been in the middle of a dream when all of the sudden you realized that you were in the middle of a dream? This phenomenon is called lucid dreaming.  Collin’s English Dictionary defines lucid dreaming as “a dream in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming and can sometimes influence the course of the dream.”

Taken from nathanielclaiborne.com

My interest in dreams began the first time I watched Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception.  I was fascinated by the thought of being able to control my own dreams just by realizing I was dreaming.  I have tried to induce a lucid dream many times, but I never had much success.  However, many people who practice the correct steps to induce a lucid dream are able to do it quite easily.  With even more practice, people can learn to control their lucid dreams.  When someone controls their dreams, they can do whatever they want while asleep.

One person who is beyond experienced in this is Beverly D’Urso.  She earned a Ph.D. in 1983, focusing on Artificial Intelligence.  She has performed experiments where she would enter a lucid dream and be monitored by scientists to see how her body was acting during the dreams.  According to Psychology Today, “She was the first person to have a recorded orgasm during a dream.  During her lucid dreams, she has tasted fire, visited the sun and overcome a writer’s block” (Brogaard).  They conducted an interview with her about her lucid dreaming.  In that interview she explained that the key to lucid dreaming is paying attention to small details during the day, and you will continue the habits while dreaming.  However, when you look at the small details in the dreams, they won’t make sense, and you will be able to realize that you are dreaming.

Picture taken from informermg.com

Another thing that could help induce a lucid dream is eating certain foods before bed.  Although the foods alone will not cause you to have lucid dreams, they will make dreams easier to recall and more intense.  Foods that are high in vitamin B6 and tryptophan will make dreams much more vivid (Turner).  They do this by increasing the level of serotonin in your brain which deals with your sleep cycle and the vividness of dreams.  The vitamin B6 must be taken through a B6 supplement pill because there are no foods that have levels high enough to affect dreams.  However there are some foods with high amounts of tryptophan: chicken, soybeans, turkey, and tuna to name a few.  I also came across some sources that said foods with high melatonin levels are the way to go.  Some of these foods would be: white mustard, black mustard, almonds, sunflower seeds, cherries, and flax seeds (Cope).

So through my research I learned that the best way to have a lucid dreams is to pay attention to small details in everyday life and eat certain foods before going to bed.

Works Cited

Brogaard, Berit. “Lucid Dreaming and Self-Realization.” Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 04 Dec. 2012. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Cope, Amy. “Foods for Vivid Dreams – Enhance Your Dream Life.” Amy Cope Bring Your Dreams into Life. N.p., 04 Nov. 2014. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

Turner, Rebecca. “15 Foods That Enhance Your Dreams.” World of Lucid Dreaming. Rebecca Turner & World of Lucid Dreaming, n.d. Web. 04 Dec. 2015.

As a bit of an aviation geek, I have often thought a lot about planes.  I, like many others, wondered how they stayed in the air.  I asked my mother this question at a very young age, and she didn’t know exactly.  From that moment on, I was fascinated by planes because they were the first thing that I stumped my mother with.  One that especially fascinated me was the stealth plane.  We have all heard about stealth planes at some point in our lives, but what actually are they and how do they work?

A stealth airplane is a plane that is less visible to radar, infrared, sonar, and other detection methods.  Stealth aircraft have their roots in WWI, but these aircraft only dealt with visibility and sound.  It wasn’t until later in WWII, when radar was invented, that modern stealth aircraft started being designed.  The first plane designed with decreased radar detection was the Horten Ho 229 made by the Germans in 1943. But, that was just the beginning. Stealth technology really took off during the cold war when countries wanted to fly missions over other countries and be undetected.  Ever since then manufacturing companies have been increasing technology to avoid radar and other forms of detection.

So, how does it work? To understand how it works we must first understand how radar detection works.  “RADAR first illuminates the target, that is, transmits a radio pulse in its direction. If any of this energy is reflected by the target, some of it may be collected by a receiving antenna” (Gillman).  The signals that were reflected back are then translated to a blip on the radar screen. The bigger the blip means more of the signal was reflected back.  So stealth planes have two ways of countering the radar signal: absorption and deflection.  Absorption works by absorbing the radio waves that are sent out by the radar.  One way planes can do this is by being built out of radio absorbing material or painted with it; it converts the radio waves to heat energy, but the process of how is still classified.  Another way that a plane can absorb the radio waves is by having a microscopic pyramid like structure on the outside of the plane with radar absorbent material between the pyramids.  These pyramids make the radio waves bounce around a lot through the absorbent material and dissipate the reflection of those waves.  The other way that planes beat the radar signals is by deflection.  Deflection is when a plane has many angles on it so the radar pulses will bounce of in directions other than the way they came from.  There are no flat surfaces presented to any direction other than directly above or below them.  This allows them to fly near radars without being detected. 

So to sum it all up, stealth planes work by flying at night, being very quiet, and by either absorbing or deflecting the radar signals that are sent at them.

Works Cited

“Explained : How Stealth Technology Works.” Defencyclopedia. WordPress, 11 Jan. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

GILMAN, LARRY. “Stealth Technology.” Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, 01 Jan. 2004. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

GILMAN, LARRY. “Stealth Technology.” Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, 01 Jan. 2004. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

“Horten Ho 229 V3.” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Smithsonian, n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

“Stealth Technology.” ENGINEERING.com. Engineering.com, 17 Oct. 2006. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

When thinking of the toughest animal in the world many people tend to think of rhinos, wild boars, or bears.  But people often forget that size isn’t what makes animals tough.  According to Google Dictionary the definition of tough is “strong enough to withstand adverse conditions or rough or careless handling; able to endure hardship or pain; physically robust.”  The animal that fits that definition perfectly is the tardigrade.

Picture taken from howitworksdaily.com

The tardigrade is an animal that is only about .5mm-1.5mm in length.  They are a phylum of small invertebrates that were discovered in 1773 by Johann August Ephrain Goeze, a German pastor.  According to Smithsonian.com most tardigrades live “out their days on a moist piece of moss or in the sediment at the bottom of a lake and feeding on bacteria or plant life” (Smithsonian).  However this is not the case for all tardigrades.  Some tardigrades live in much more extreme environments.  Tardigrades have been found living in freezing conditions under layers of ice.  However, they are also found living in the boiling springs of Japan (BBC).  They can survive in temperatures as low as -328 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 304 degrees Fahrenheit.  They can live without water or oxygen for decades, and withstand x-ray radiation levels that are 1000 times the dose that is lethal for humans.  Tardigrades can also survive the low pressure of a vacuum and pressures that are 6 times higher than the deepest part of the ocean (SERC).  They can also survive a number of other extreme conditions that other animals cannot.  With their ability to survive in such hostile conditions, it is almost unsurprising that tardigrades have even survived a journey through space.  According to BBC, “In 2007, thousands of tardigrades were attached to a satellite and blasted into space.”  Many of those tardigrades survived the trip, and some females even laid eggs that hatched and survived in space.

The way that they survive all these crazy conditions is through a process called cryptobiosis.  “Cryptobiosis is defined as a state in which metabolic activities come to a reversible standstill” (SERC).  This means that tardigrades can go into a death like state where they do not consume any energy.  There are several types of cryptobiosis for different extreme conditions: if there is a lack of water, they undergo anhydrobiosis; if there is an extremely low temperature, they undergo cryobiosis; if there is an increased solute concentration, they undergo osmobiosis; and if there is a lack of oxygen they undergo anoxybiosis (SERC).  The most important part is that they can come out of those states.  For example, a tardigrade can undergo anhydrobiosis and become dehydrated, then they can be revived by being put back into water.

Now it is obvious that the tardigrade is the definition of tough because of its extreme ability to fight through adverse situations despite its tiny size.

Works Cited

Bordenstein, Sarah. “Tardigrades.” Tardigrade. SERC, 23 June 2014. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Fox-Skelly, Jasmin. “Tardigrades Return from the Dead.” BBC. BBC, 13 Mar. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

MacDonald, Fiona. “The Tardigrade Genome Has Been Sequenced, and It Has the Most Foreign DNA of Any Animal.” ScienceAlert. N.p., 25 Nov. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Stromberg, Joseph. “How Does the Tiny Waterbear Survive in Outer Space?” Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian, 11 Sept. 2012. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.

Hello, my name is Adam Horst.  I am a freshman from Lancaster, PA.  No, I am not Amish or Mennonite, and I do not live on a farm.  I am from a small town called Akron, but I went to Ephrata High School.  My free time in high school was consumed by playing sports and working countless hours at Horst Auction Center.  I played baseball for a few years, and before my senior year, I decided to play for Ephrata’s football team.  If you live in Lancaster, you know that our team is terrible; we have won a total of 5 games since 2010, and we haven’t had a win since 2012.  However, I still decided to give it a shot, and we ended up losing every game.  Whenever I wasn’t playing sports, I was working for my family at our auction company.  I spent most of my summers working everyday for the auction center, and I met many interesting people who have taught me a lot over the years.  I went to many different places with the business, and most of my skills with people come from my work experience.  I am currently in the Smeal College of Business, and plan to enter the business world after I graduate.  I took this class because I needed a science class to enter my major and it seemed like it would be an interesting class.

Here is a picture of the Ephrata Cloister.