We’ve all seen the commercials for Cheerios and they always somewhere throw in that, “Cheerios can help low cholesterol”. See it would be false advertising if they were just saying that and they really didn’t help do anything for your health at all, so there has to be some truth behind the statement. It could only lower it a little bit, say by 1%, which means they can still say that it does lower your cholesterol. It could lower it by 30% though, which is a lot more significant and worth noting on your box than 1%. So do Cheerios really influence your diet and help with that bad cholesterol?

First off, what is cholesterol? Cholesterol is waxy and fat-like and is found in all the cells of your body. It’s used to make hormones and helps you digest food easier. Lipoproteins are what a pack of cholesterol is called, which moves through your bloodstream, and are made of fat on the outside and proteins on the inside. There are two types of lipoproteins, good and bad ones, high-density (HDL) and low-density (LDL). Too much of either is bad, but too much LDL can cause blockage in your arteries, which blocks blood flow to the heart. So, you want to keep your arteries clear and blood flowing and you do that with having a good balance of cholesterol.

Livestrong reported in their article about a study that was performed by Dr. Kevin C. Maki where he tested to see if Cheerios really did lower cholesterol. At the start of the study, they recorded everyone’s blood cholesterol level and did the same after the study was over. In the study they used regular Cheerios with 100% natural whole grain oats with one gram of sugar per serving. The subjects were fed two 1 1/2-cup servings of Cheerios for 12 weeks and ate a reduced calorie diet. The subjects’ diets were monitored for the whole 12 weeks and at the end, Dr. Maki concluded that Cheerios can in fact, lower cholesterol levels by about 10% in one month.

In a similar study done by the Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition, the same conclusion was drawn. They also fed their subjects 1 1/2 cups of Cheerios twice a day for 12 weeks along with a reduced calorie diet. Although in this study, there were two groups, the Cheerio group and the control group. The Cheerio group was obviously the one eating the Cheerios and the control group was eating 1 1/2 servings of foods that were similar to Cheerios in calories. After 4 weeks, the Cheerio group lowered their LDL cholesterol about 10% and the control group only about 5%. After 12 weeks, the same results still stood, where the Cheerio group had reduced their cholesterol more than the control group.

From these two studies, that drew the same conclusion, I can conclude that Cheerios can lower your LDL (bad) cholesterol in about 12 weeks. This is only if you are eating a healthy diet with other low cholesterol foods like Cheerios. These studies could have been improved by giving the information on how many subjects there were and their ages and genders and things like that, which would back it up more. If the people all were already pretty healthy, then lowering their cholesterol would be easier than someone who had very high cholesterol and not as healthy. Eat your Cheerios!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z01qH-jqGBY

Everyone wants to eat as healthy as possible and have a lot of energy to get through the long days we endeavor. What you put in your body effects everything you do. There are so many choices that we can pick from, which can make it hard to choose what is good and right for you all the time. Every morning I start my day with a Chobani Greek yogurt, apple, and a coffee. Why did I choose greek yogurt over just any other yogurt? Greek yogurt is apparently better for you than regular yogurt, but is it really? Isn’t yogurt just yogurt?

At the basis, yogurt is yogurt and have similar qualities. Kurtis Hiatt and Angela Haupt discuss that really any type of yogurt is healthy for you because they all have low calories and and a lot of calcium. There are many things to compare between Greek and regular yogurt such as protein, carbohydrates, and sodium.

Protein is important  because it helps to build and repair tissue in the body. Having a good handle on your proteins will give you many benefits. Recovering quickly after injuries, building lean muscle, curbing hunger, and maintaining a healthy weight can all be owed to having a decent amount of protein in your diet. Greek yogurt is high in protein since one container (8oz) has about 17g while a regular container of yogurt has about 9g. Getting a decent amount of protein with one meal is beneficial so you won’t snack more to get those extra proteins.

Carbohydrates give your body energy. You want to be eating simple carbohydrates because those are the healthy sugars for you. You don’t want to be loading up on sugary foods like candy, but sugary foods like strawberries and fruits are okay to eat. Greek yogurt is considered a low carb food with about 7g compared to about 14g in regular yogurt. Greek yogurt also gets strained which removes the a lot of the lactose and complex sugars.

Having a lot of sodium in your diet isn’t really a good thing because it can block blood flow which can increase blood pressure which can cause other issues. Sodium also holds blood and if you have too much of it in your system, it could be holding too much water which would increase your blood volume which also leads to other bad issues with muscles and nerve functions. A healthy diet consists of less than 2,300mg of sodium a day. Greek yogurt has about 61.2mg as compared to regular yogurt with about 125mg.

As you can see from the nutritional comparisons, Greek yogurt does seem to be the better choice of yogurts. It has a higher nutritional value in just one cup than regular yogurt tends to have. I can only imagine that regular yogurt companies are already on their way in trying to develop or alter their yogurts to make them healthier and give them a higher nutritional value to compete with Greek yogurt. Although, Greek yogurt does have a different taste, and isn’t for everyone, so maybe they possibly aren’t trying to change their ways. Overall, if you want a healthy snack, go Greek.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. Okay but why? And is it really? Breakfast is definitely my favorite meal of the day, but why is it so important to make sure to eat that meal? Are there specific foods we should be sticking to during breakfast or can we eat whatever our little hearts desire? I think that it has to deal with the timing of the day and how it works into our metabolisms. I assume there are more health benefits other than boosting your metabolism for why it is so important. According to CalorieKing eating breakfast can boost brain activity.

Allison Aubrey says that food is the most “basic fuel” we can give to our brains. Food has glucose in it and our brains just can’t work correctly without that. Not getting enough glucose can effect our visual system and it makes it harder to comprehend things which then effects the memory and makes it harder to remember things. Remembering things and understanding what you are learning is important to anyones’ education because to preform well on tests, you have remember and intake the information you are being taught.

Aubrey outlined a study in her article that was done with 4,000 elementary students that measured the effects breakfast had on their academic success (where she got this study from could not be determined, she did not credit anyone). What was measured was short term memory and verbal fluency. For short term memory, the kids were to read a series of digits and then they recorded how many they repeated back correctly. To test verbal skills, the kids were told to rattle off as many animals they could in 60 seconds. The results of the study were that the kids who ate breakfast preformed a lot better than those who chose not to eat.

The Iowa Breakfast studies measured the effectiveness of eating breakfast on mental efficiency. The subjects diets were controlled completely during all meals. The subjects would go through a cafeteria line and take whatever food they wanted and how much they wanted and the dietitians would record what they are eating. This happened for about two or three weeks so they could get into a regular routine. This was how the dietitians figured out how to control all meals for all the subjects. There were six different breakfast plans they tested. 1. Cereal and Milk with 751 calories 2. Bacon, egg and milk with 751 calories 3. Heavy breakfast pattern with 1201 calories 4. Light breakfast with 307 calories 5. Low protein breakfast with 765 calories 6. Animal and plant protein with 750 calories. The subjects in each breakfast type were as follows 1. 25 school boys 2. Six college women 3. Ten college women 4. Eleven college men 5. Ten college men 6. Eight older men.

Each group was given a test that satisfied their new dietary habits or stresses. This was to efficiently measure their physiological changes due to the new breakfast. 1. Simple reaction time 2. Choice reaction time 3. Neuromuscular tremor magnitude 4. Maximum grip strength 5. Grip strength endurance 6. Maximum work rate. The results from the tests ended up rejecting the null hypothesis that not eating breakfast was fine.

Concluding from this experiment, it is important to eat breakfast because it will boost your brain power and will make the tasks you do during the day more efficient because you are more stimulated and ready for whatever you are doing. Eating a balanced diet will make your brain activity even more efficient because you are getting al your basic nutrients and glucose that you need to perform well at any task. I guess my next question is what is the best breakfast someone should be eating for optimal success.

The Cheerleader Effect is that seeing faces in a group makes them all seem and look more attractive. Does that really make sense? Just because there are a bunch of girls together, or a pack of guys, does that really just automatically make them go from 7s-9s? 6s-10s?? How many people does this even require to happen? All these questions leave me very skeptical that it really is a thing. When I look at a group of guys, I can pick out the ones that aren’t as attractive (that sounds mean but I’m trying to make a point) and that leads me to believe this isn’t really a thing. Maybe everyone in the group is already really attractive and that proves nothing.

In a study done in the Netherlands, people were asked to first rate a group of females, then rate them individually and this was done with five different groups. There were two controls, one of which where the group saw just the individual and had to rate them, and in the other the people saw the group as a whole and has to rate the individuals from that. They did this because there can be visual differences and opinions when people are only seeing the face versus seeing the face and whole or part of the body. Seeing the body can change things. They thought that possibly rating the people as a group changed the outcome due to comparing the faces because they all are right next to each other. The third condition was rating the group as a whole. The scale went from 1 through 7, 1 being not attractive at all and 7 being very attractive. Everyone was randomly assigned to the three groups, each group with 53 or 52 members. To come to a conclusion, they had to do a few calculations. For the conditions rating just the individuals, “we averaged the individual attractiveness ratings to obtain the groups’ mean attractiveness rating” and then they compared that to the third condition where people rated the group as a whole. Results were consistent with the Cheerleader Effect since the ratings of a group as a whole versus just the individual averages were a lot higher.

This is something the online dating world thinks about when selecting a profile picture. Is the selfie good enough alone or do I need a little encouragement from my friends in a group shot from the other night? Drew Walker and Edward Vul, from the University of California, suggest that this effect comes from three factors. The first is “the visual system automatically computes ensemble representations of faces presented in a group”. Second factor is, “individual members of the group are biased toward this ensemble average” and the third, “average faces are attractive”. Basically saying that a bunch of average looking people will end up looking attractive together due to the way our visual system works and groups faces. If the group members have a positive expression, they tend to seem more attractive together because when we look at groups, we look at them as a whole, and not focus much on the individual subjects. So going with that thought, a group of average looking people will tend to seem more attractive because we are not looking directly at the individual and their features. Walker and Vul also did a study very similar to the one done in the Netherlands and they also concluded that the average attractiveness of a group versus individuals was higher.

I can conclude that I was wrong, and apparently this is a real thing, which I think after reading the studies and experiments, does make sense. Something to take away form this is if you aren’t feeling good about your appearance, go out with a group, you’ll look better. If you’re trying to find “the one” on match.com, go with a group shot because you’ll probably look better than if you choose the selfie. Who knew cheerleaders had so much to teach us?

When I first started trying coffee and wanting to drink it all the time, I was probably around 13 or 14 (I’m a young coffee addict, I know) and my dad would always freak out about me drinking it. At that age, I couldn’t put my finger on why drinking coffee was bad because he drank it all the time, so obviously it wasn’t bad for you. I continued to drink it as I pleased because it didn’t make sense to me why my dad didn’t want me drinking it. A few years later, I heard that coffee could stunt your growth if you start drinking it too young. But seriously, how real could that statement be? Now that I’m 18, have been hefty coffee drinker since I started, and still the same height I was when I was 12, I’m starting to believe the statement has some truth behind it.

There has to be something in the coffee that is affecting a person’s growth, that is if coffee is even correlated with affecting growth. So, what’s in coffee? Coffee comes from the coffee bean, and the two most popular plants that it comes from are the arabica and robusta plants. The arabica plant beans contain about .8-1.4% caffeine and robusta beans have about 1.7-4% caffeine in them, which are pretty decent percentages. So maybe it’s the caffeine that is stunting kids growth.

A study done by Quinlan P, Lane J, Aspinall L looked into what the effect of a 400mL cup of coffee can do to the body. They looked at heart rate, salivary cortisol, nervous system activation, mood, and blood pressure on a group of 16 “caffeine-withdrawn” subjects. There were two trials done. The subjects drank coffee with 100 mg caffeine and then coffee without the caffeine. All the previously mentioned variables were measured 10-30 minutes after ingesting the drink because that’s when they concluded the effects were at their pinnacle. The results showed that when caffeine was added to the hot drinks, the subjects showed reduce anxiety and skin temperature. It increased the psychological responses of the subjects and had no affect on the salivary cortisol. The only thing this study concluded about caffeine’s effects on the body is that is stimulated physiological processes faster. It found nothing about effecting the body’s growth.

The University of Delaware reported that in a study where coffee drinkers were followed over a long period of time, bone growth was not something that was shown to be effected. Through further research, they came across that the calcium in the coffee might be causing an effect on the body’s growth. Studies were done that showed how well the body absorbs different amounts of calcium. The results showed that the body can compensate for different amounts of calcium, meaning that if one is consuming more calcium than normal, their body won’t be effected in a terrible way. Dairy is supposed to make your bones stronger and grow, and it is said that coffee drinkers don’t drink as much dairy. UDel concludes that the claim “coffee drinkers don’t drink as much dairy” as anyone else, doesn’t prove anything about stunting growth.

UDel also reported on another study where a group of 81 girls, ages 12 to 18 were followed over a six year period. The effect caffeine has on total body bone mineral gain was measured after the six years of them drinking 25mg to 50mg of caffeine each day. There was no correlation found between caffeine consumption and bone growth.

Form these three studies, it sounds like coffee or caffeine isn’t going to stunt anyone’s growth when they are still growing. The first study I talked about only proved that caffeine could reduce anxiety levels and increase physiological processes, which don’t sound like bad things at all; A little less stress and some more energy doesn’t sound like it’ll hurt anyone. The second study regarding calcium ingestion suggests that calcium is necessary to bone growth and the caffeine to calcium ratio in the body is irrelevant since the body can make up for the calcium someone isn’t ingesting. The third study was done well since they used all one gender and in the same age group, girl who were still growing. By varying the amounts of caffeine ingested each day was good because then the caffeine levels each day are fluctuating so the body can’t adapt to one caffeine level. Even with all that going on, they still found no correlation between growth and caffeine consumption. Therefore, coffee isn’t stunting anyone’s growth, for now.

I guess I can stop blaming my young coffee addiction for my short height. I guess I have to start blaming my genetics or something.

Our brains work in crazy weird ways and some of the ways it works, we still don’t understand. What I want to know is how we learn a language. I know that when you’re young it’s easier to learn a language because you don’t already have a large language barrier on your speech and communication skills, so it’s easy to adopt one or two languages at once. I also know that the larger your language barrier grows, you can’t make certain sounds or say things a certain way, but I want to know how that even happens. We didn’t have to work or study stuff to learn are native language, so how did it just happen?

It’s said that discovering a language is the best way to learn it, which is how we learned our native language. We wanted to know what something was and someone would tell us and the fact that we wanted to know made us remember and retain the information. We would retain the information exactly, or close to, how the person educating us would say it, which is why people have certain accents in certain areas because they are just copying how their parents or whoever talked. We pick up some words and then eventually some phrases and then start putting all those together to form sentences and full thoughts in our own language.

When we are infants, we are like sponges. We soak up all the information we are told and since our memories are the freshest and emptiest they will ever be in our lives, we can retain a lot of the information we are being told. Infants have a special language learning part of their brain that eventually goes away and gets reversed after we get the hang of our first language. This makes it hard to pick up and learn a new language easily. It could also be due to not being exposed to that language environment constantly. Another reason it’s hard to learn another language is because we are taught it, we don’t learn it; memorizing is a big part that messes a lot of people up. We all are good a memorizes things, it all just comes back to how we memorize and what we believe is important to remember.

After learning so much and thinking in a certain language for so long, it’s hard to start over and learn a new one in a classroom setting. Sitting in a room and being forced to learn something new and probably confusing like a new language after learning all day can be really boring, which is why it’s hard to teach a new language. Living the language is easier because it forces you to get to know what words for things are and then learn phrases and so on. Being in the language environment is how our brain picks up easier something new. Just trying to memorize new verbs and words is hard and most of the time, ineffective.

How some people are taught French.

So by constantly hearing something over and over again, you will eventually pick it up and understand what’s going on; that’s basically how we learn our first language. People are constantly talking to you and your little infant brain and you just have to figure what in the world is going on, and you successful do it by the time you are about two or three. You adjust to the world around you and learn from what you see.

Will we ever reach the point where we are 100% (or very close to) dependent on renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, hydropower, biomass, or maybe even something else we discover? It sounds like something we could get close to and should probably start figuring out if we can reach that goal because we are going to run out of coal and natural gas eventually. There have been many plans made by leaders and politicians that are very plausible, all they really need is to be funded, put into action, and executed properly. Easier said than done, though.

In 2008, Al Gore came up with a five step plan to reduce our carbon footprint hopefully by the year 2030. The goals he wanted to achieve was to install renewable energy sources across the nation that would help work towards reducing the climate crisis and help out the economy by creating jobs. It’s going to take a while to achieve this and I don’t know if I agree with that he thinks we could have had it done in 20 years (from the time he proposed the plan).  Maybe by 2050 we could achieve something very close to his goal.

The five steps to his plan are as followed:

1. Construct power plants in southwest, wind farms in the Midwest, and find and identify geothermal hot spots and place plants in these areas.
2. Build a “national smart grid” to help distribute the energy across the nation efficiently.
3. Convert cars to plug-in hybrids to reduce gas emissions.
4. Enforce stricter rules on buildings to become more “green”.
5. Create climate regulations to reduce the climate crisis.

All of these sound great on paper, but like I said before, easier said than done. Step two includes a $400 billion investment just to create the grids and get them running properly. Although, in the long run it is hoped that it will make up for and pay off the $120 billion power failures other energy grids have annually. Step three would be difficult to achieve because it would be very hard to get everyone to buy a hybrid car because automakers are still going to want to make their cars and trucks with whatever engines they prefer and that work with their automobiles. They would have to completely change the design of their cars. But if the government made a law saying automakers are required by law to make hybrids then maybe it could work, but I’m pretty sure the government can’t tell companies what to make. Environmental laws are plausible and can be made and passed, we already have a bunch that are helping the environment already.

If we find a way to fix all the problems I thought of (and others I didn’t address) with Gore’s plan, then yeah, I do think we could become a totally renewable energy dependent country and possibly world. It is possible, but expensive and everyone has to work together to achieve the goal. I think once people realize that we really are in an energy crisis, they will start working towards these goals and trying to help out. But with our history, this realization won’t be until it’s to late and we have to scramble to figure out what to do, even though plenty of people are giving warnings right now.

There are so many colors in the world, but we all agree that blue is blue and pink is pink, but why and is that even accurate? Is my red the same hue and color as your red? Do we see our colors at the same intensity? I’m not talking about being colored blind, but that we just agree that orange is orange, but are our oranges the same? Everyone is different so how could we possibly be all looking at every color the same way, there is no way that’s happening so I truly believe my colors can be different from your colors.

In our retina’s, we have 6-7 million cones and about 120 million rods that help us reflect and receive light and color. We also have three color sensitive cones, green-sensitive, blue-sensitive, and red-sensitive that pick up all the colors on the spectrum. When we look at an object, light is being both absorbed and reflected off that object and we receive what is being reflected and we see that color in the light-sensitive retina back of our eye. We have three different color sensitive cones because they all respond differently to different color lights. 64% of the cones are receiving red light, 34% are receiving the green light, and about 2% are receiving the blue light. When we look at an object, the optic nerve sends a signal to visual cortex of our brain which then sends back to our brain and eyes whatever color the object is.

diagram of the eye

Humans have the red-sensitive cone that other mammals don’t have, which means we see and distinguish colors better than them, meaning our colors ARE different from other mammals colors, but that still doesn’t answer if an  individual human’s colors are different from one another.

We all agree the sky is blue and the sun is yellow and the grass is green. Blue has shorter wavelengths than red, which makes them blue and red. The way we perceive the colors may be different from each other, but we all are receiving them as the same wavelengths. When anyone looks at the sky, we are all receiving shorter wavelengths no matter what so we all are seeing some type of blue. When we all look at a fire, we are all receiving longer wavelengths and sometime of red or yellow mix of colors.

There is an emotional connection we all have to colors and light. Shorter wavelengths make us feel calm and longer ones make us feel active. At night, there are more short-wave lengths around in the light, making us tired and that’s why we sleep at night. Around sunrise and sunset are when we are most active because the longer wavelengths make us feel active and energized and more alert. These are all universal responses that humans take to color and light. A study was done where they changed the ambient light as opposed to the intensity of the light and it proved why more blue light at night makes us more tired and why yellow light in the morning makes us active.

In 1998, another color sensitive cone was discovered in the eye called melanopsin, which processes how much blue and yellow light the eye is receiving. This information gets sent to the part of the brain that handles emotions. Humans have similar emotions to similar colors, but that doesn’t mean we are perceiving the light and colors in the same way. Even if someone looks at the something you call blue and sees red, that doesn’t change how they emotionally feel when they see their blue.

I think my colors can and might possibly be different from your colors. I don’t believe that our colors are extremely different, as in I don’t think that what I call purple, someone else is calling yellow, but I do believe that what I call orange, someone might call yellow because we are picking up different frequencies of wave lengths from the same object. Colors from individual to individual most likely are different, but not extremely, aside from color-blind people.

Do you ever hear a song and instantly fall in love with it? Instantly hate it? You only hear 20-30 seconds of the song and you most likely will decide if you like it or not. How does our brain do this? How from such a small sample do we know that we like the song or not? I guess it’s easier to decide if you like it or not if it’s from a genre you enjoy. What exactly in our brains give us this taste in music and quick ability to judge a song?

One explanation comes from a study that studies the reward value people got from listening to music from their auditory cortex and nucleus accumben. Those both are affiliated with the reward circuit of the brain. When the brain hears something that it likes, it is sent to the auditory cortex and nucleus acumen and the response is that dopamine is released. This happens so fast, which is why our brains can hear a little bit of a song and instantly know if we like it or not. The dopamine makes us want to hear more and agree with other songs that sound similar. This only happens with humans though due to our memory, experience, and the way our auditory cortex processes information. Although animals may not remember or pick up music like we do, they still react and enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLjn7WwGj0s

Another reason we react so quickly to music is because of past experiences we’ve had with other types of music that sound similar. At our age, we have enough experience with different types of music genres and types for our brains to have had “record” a certain type of music that we prefer or go nuts about. Genres we like instantly release dopamine from the ‘pleasure center’ to out parts of our brains when we hear them. From this picture of the brain, the pleasure center is the center of the activity of the arrows. The arrows indicate where the dopamine is flowing when we hear a song we like. The pleasure center basically evaluates how you will like a song based on previous songs you enjoy. This is why it’s easy to like a new band in your favorite genre so quickly as opposed to listening to a completely new genre where you will most likely not like it. The pleasure center is also connected with emotions, which is another way the brain evaluates if you might enjoy the song or not.

Emotions, memory, pleasure, and preference all go into liking and choosing what types of music you like. The connections that our brains make in split seconds are possible due to all of the previous knowledge it contains from you just living your life. Dopamine plays a huge part in what music we like because depending on how much is released will depend on how much you enjoy the song or not. From researching this, I found out a lot about how the human brain works and what connects with what to enjoy stuff, but it made me think, do animals enjoy things like we do? You saw the elephant enjoy the classical music, but did he really enjoy it? What type of music really calms or energizes animals? This is something I’m going to have to look into.

Are you ever really hungry one day and then the next your appetite disappears? This happens to me all the time. One day I’ll eat like a 280 pound linebacker and the next day I just forget to eat. Is it because I ate too much one the day before or I didn’t eat the one day so the next I am starving? Am I more distracted one day and don’t eat because of that and just bored so I eat a ton because of that? I needed answers because it just didn’t make sense to me that someone’s appetite could change that drastically from one day to another, but apparently there are many reasons this could happen.

Over-eating on certain days can be related to lack of sleep. A study done by German and Swedish Universities found that the ghrelin (an enzyme in your stomach which stimulates appetite) in your blood rises when you are sleep deprived. The study also looked at physical activity to relate how active and hungry someone is from day to day. It was found that there is a possible correlation between lack of sleep and lack of energy for the next day, which makes because if you don’t sleep then you are “recharging” yourself so to say and then you will be running on low levels of energy. If you are sleep deprived, you are most likely energy deprived, which means you are going to be lazy with your food choices and eat unhealthy things and you will mindlessly eat as well, causing you to overeat.

Being stressed out can lead to over or under eating, which I never really thought about, but I can see no why it is a factor. When someone is stressed, they tend to stress-eat to get their minds off whatever they are stressing about. People who are stressed tend to eat more so they stay distracted and don’t have that empty feeling their stress is giving them. Fats and carbs help people ease their mind and so the more they eat, the less stress they feel. There are some people though that get so stressed sometimes and forget to eat all together because their mind is so engulfed with their stress. Scientists found that stress increases the release of endogenous opioids in the brain, which is our addictive response coming out. The more this is released, the more food people are going to want to eat from their stress.

Maybe you aren’t even hungry at all and are just bored, but your brain is saying eat it anyway. You could have just left the dinner table and sat down to do something else, but it’s boring and you hate school work so your brain starts to wander. It wanders all the way to the fridge, but why? Because the chemical dopamine in our brains is related to motivation and drive and this comes out when we are bored and trying to think of something quick and easy to do, and what’s easier than opening the fridge and grabbing a snack? Dopamine in our brains encourages you to find something that will fill your boredom quickly. We overeat when we are bored because our brains are thinking it is filling the boredom, but really all you are doing is wasting time and well, overeating.

So I guess I did have a pretty good idea on what was happening when I indulged one day and not the next. Maybe I’m a stressed out person or just extremely bored on somedays, could be a combination of both. The chemicals in our brains can play pretty tricky tricks on us and force us to do stuff that we really don’t intend to do, like excessively eat or be so engulfed in something where we forget to eat. I’ll have to keep these tips in mind next time I have a bad day and decide to eat everything in my fridge. (P.S. This doesn’t happen a lot, it’s not like I have an eating problem, I’m a pretty active and healthy person, everyone has those days though.)

but really, who doesn’t feel like this sometimes

I have played field hockey my entire life. If you just walked up to a game with no prior knowledge, you would think we all look ridiculous and would be wondering why the whistle blows every other second. Why are they only using one side of the stick? Ten field players, what? Why aren’t they using their bodies? So many questions would be going through your mind, it’s really quiet simple. Keep the ball away from the other team and put it in the net. Don’t use your body and watch your back swing. Newton’s laws of motion can be applied to field hockey.

How hard you hit the ball in certain situations is very important. How far is my teammate from me and how hard do I have to hit it and at what angle are all things we have to think about when delivering a pass efficiently. Newton’s first law is the law of inertia. We have to hit the ball so that it goes a certain distance at a certain efficient speed to get to our teammate. The law states that once an object is moving in a certain direction, it will move in that direction forever, unless acted upon by another source. The ball gets hit by our sticks with all the power we can pull in from our legs and muscles in our bodies and it will only stop if it is picked up by another played who intercepts it or the ground’s friction will slow it to a stop because it wasn’t hit hard enough. The force of the hit determines how far it will go.

The second law of motion is about force. Force is mass x acceleration. The mass in this case would be the size of the ball, which is a little bit smaller than a softball, just about the size of a baseball. The acceleration part comes from when the player hits the ball. The more strength behind the hit, the further it will go. All field hockey balls are made the same so the acceleration depends on the player and how hard they hit it. Therefore, force is different with every player and with different types of hits. Short quick passes don’t need that much force, but long drives down the field need a lot of force.

Equal and opposing forces is the third of Newton’s laws. When a player is dribbling the ball, she is only putting force on the one side of the ball to push it forward. There isn’t anything on the other side of the ball to stop her or to interrupt her dribbling. When another player steps up to defend and disrupt the attacking player from moving forward, once the defender puts her stick on the ball, she is going to put enough force to stop the ball dead and the two players will be stuck in one spot, not moving because they both are putting the same force on either side of the ball. The only way the ball is going to budge after this is if one player stops adding the same amount of force on her side or if one player pulls the ball away and around the other player.

While we are playing, we aren’t actually directly thinking of Newton’s laws, but they are still there. When we are playing, we are thinking that we have to avoid the other players and can’t let them get the ball. We have to use our acceleration and force to get the ball where we want it to be. We have to think about that if we run right into another player, the ball will get stopped and we could possibly loose it. See we aren’t directly thinking about the laws, but we kind of are with our decision making. Newton’s laws play a big part in effective playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_zJg0d7xc8

Hi, I’m Katherine Bartkowski from Collegeville, PA. I’m currently in DUS but I’m interested in Energy, Business and Finance which is basically trying to figure out alternative energy sources and making them easily accessible to the masses.

I’m taking this course because I never really liked science until my senior year when I took environmental where we learned about all the problems with the environment and what people are and aren’t doing to help. I found it interesting and realized that I guess I actually do like science. Science is everywhere and in everything, which I think is cool and this class is about how science is everywhere, so that’s why I’m taking it.

Although my intended major does involve science, I think I want to be more on the business side of it, the selling of the energy and figuring out how to distribute it to as many people as possible. I like math and efficient distribution involves math so I can see myself doing that.

I play field hockey, it has been my life since I can remember. Weeks and weekends consumed of it all fall and winter for ages, but it didn’t bother me since I like it so much. Senior year we won our conference and it was probably the best way I could have ended my hockey career, well that’s what I thought when I thought I was just going to end it after high school. I changed my mind this summer when I realized how much I love it and how I just wasn’t ready to give it up. This is a picture of me and my team right before the championship game started.

 click here to see our stats showing that we were number one in our conference